


SWORD and SHIELD

by Rainne



Series: How Steve Rogers Got His Groove Back [6]
Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV), Captain America (Movies), Iron Man (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Incredible Hulk - All Media Types, Thor (Movies)
Genre: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Spoilers, Bucky Barnes & Steve Rogers Friendship, Bucky Barnes Has Issues, Bucky's still broken, Canon-Typical Violence, Clint Needs a Hug, Dogs, F/M, I need to be stopped, I'm asking because of reasons, M/M, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Service Animals, Sometimes I wish I had never told people I was going to write this, Steve Rogers Has Issues, Therapy, Tony Stark Is a Good Bro, damsels in a small amount of distress but very embarrassed by it, everyone is in this fic okay, freaking everyone, how does everyone feel about Bucky/Jemma?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-29
Updated: 2014-07-01
Packaged: 2018-01-27 00:40:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 13
Words: 56,250
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1708589
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rainne/pseuds/Rainne
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>SHIELD has fallen. There are those who are willing to step into the debris and rebuild, but it's hard to fix things when you're already so broken yourself.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Here we go, ladies and gents! The long-awaited next arc of Groove-verse! 
> 
> Things you should expect from this fic: humor, angst, whacks to the heart with a baseball bat made of feels, Very Angry Clint Barton, Bucky Barnes and his dog being stupidly adorable, and a whole lot of me having no idea what I am doing.
> 
> Things you should not expect from this fic: clowns.

The sound of stealthy movement alerted the Winter Soldier that he was not alone. He didn't move, didn't look up, didn't so much as change his breathing, but he felt his entire body tense up. The fight he had been looking forward to for so long now was finally here.

He continued on with his previous activity, perusing the contents of a shelf as though they held the answers to Life, the Universe, and Everything - and maybe they did, considering that was actually the title of one of the books in front of him - and he waited to see what would happen.

He could hear his target breathing.

Very few people understood how truly enhanced the Winter Soldier was. The scientists were still trying to learn, to catalog the very limits of his abilities, and he indulged them as patiently as he was able. But whatever had been done to him - by Zola, by Department X, and all the others who'd gotten a finger into that pie - had changed his very nature.

The target moved.

An ordinary person would have never suspected a thing. An ordinary person would have stood there at the shelf like the dumb sheep he was pretending to be, perusing the books, blissfully unaware of the danger that lurked. But the Winter Soldier was not ordinary. Had perhaps been ordinary once, but not any more, and never again.

The target came into range.

The Winter Soldier pulled out the gun he'd hidden in his waistband, took aim between the shelves, and fired one shot.

The “successful kill” alert sounded, and Clint Barton swore colorfully. Bucky Barnes laughed softly as he tucked his little pistol back into his waistband. “You're an idiot, Barton,” he said, stepping out of the stacks in the little library and smirking at Clint, who was standing three rows away and pushing at the button that reset his laser tag vest. “Did you honestly think you could sneak up on me?”

“Yes!” Clint snapped, looking very put out. “As a matter of fact, I did.”

“Well, keep trying,” Bucky said, giving him an encouraging pat on the shoulder and a shit-eating grin. “Maybe someday you'll be a real boy.”

“Yeah, that's funny coming from you, Pinocchio.”

Bucky waved his left arm. “No, I'm the Tin Man.”

Clint gave him the finger, holstering his own laser tag gun. “How the hell do you do that, anyway?” Clint asked, mostly genuinely curious and only slightly whiny.

“I told you before, pal, I can hear you coming,” Bucky said, shaking his head. “It's not my fault you don't believe me.”

“I _don't_ ,” Clint argued. “I didn't make any noise _at all_ when I came through there.”

“Dude,” Bucky said, in a tone he'd obviously picked up from Darcy. “You were _breathing_.”

Clint made a sound of disgust. “I do  _not_ believe that you can hear me breathing from across the room.”

“Then you're gonna keep losing,” Bucky replied easily, shrugging. He turned back to the bookshelves. “You're trying to use a skill set you don't possess. I know that Natal - _Natasha_ \- has taught you some of the things she knows. That's good; I approve of anyone who wants to... what's the phrase? Up your game?” At Clint's nod, Bucky continued. “You got two problems, though. First, you're not as good at it as she is, and you never will be, because she's been doing it since she was a very tiny child. Second, I taught her a lot of what she knows. Those tricks she's shown you? She got them from me. You cannot beat me at my own game when you just learned it recently and only secondhand.”

There was silence for a long moment as Clint processed this and Bucky studied the bookshelf, finally pulling a thick hardbound volume off the shelf. He turned and faced Clint. “What's your specialty,  _Hawkeye_ ?”

“ISTAR,” Clint replied immediately. “Intelligence, surveillance, target acquisition, and reconnaisance.”

“Exactly,” Bucky said. “You're a long-range marksman. That's the main difference between you and me, and also the main reason why you and Natasha worked so well together as Strike Team Delta. The skill sets are complementary. You do the long range stuff. Me and her, we're trained - and _well_ trained, for a long time - on the close-in stuff. That's not to say I can't give you a run for your money on a sniper course; I was a marksman with the Commandos long before Zola got his hands on me, and I used those skills for Department X for a long time. But when it comes to makin' people dead, man, I'm multifunctional. I can pop you from a rooftop a block away, or I can wait in your closet with a garrotte. _Your_ skill set is distant, so _use_ it. I guarantee you I ain't gonna hear you breathing from eight hundred feet.”

Clint made a face. “It's tough to get that kind of distance when you barely leave the building.”

Bucky smirked. “Sounds like an obstacle you're just gonna have to overcome if you wanna get over being four kills behind.”

***

“The Murder Triplets are at it again,” Tony Stark said, apropos of nothing, when Steve Rogers walked into his lab.

“Ramping up on my increasingly desperate requests that we _not call them that_ ,” Steve replied. 

As though Steve hadn't even spoken, Tony continued. “Barton came in here earlier asking about rappelling equipment and whether or not the laser tag gear would work through the tower windows.”

“If Darcy catches him on the outside of her bedroom window, he won't have to worry about losing at laser tag,” Steve commented, hopping up onto a lab stool. “And you'll be back to talking about Murder Twins.”

“Ah, the good old days,” Tony sighed, fake nostalgia fairly dripping from him. He smirked at Steve. “So, what can I do you for, Cap?”

“Just checking in to see how everything's going.”

“You're bored.”

“Out of my _mind_.” Steve slumped back against the workbench. “Darcy's threatened to set me on fire using only the power of her mind twice today. I'm afraid the next time I won't get a warning.”

“You do know she's not _actually_ a pyro, don't you?” Tony asked, smirking.

Steve raised an eyebrow. “Do you want to take the risk that she is and we just don't know it? She  _has_ been spending a lot of time with Pepper, and Pepper  _is_ a pyro.”

The smirk slowly faded off Tony's face, replaced by an expression of dawning horror. “No,” he said. “No, I don't.”

“Exactly.”

Tony took a deep breath. “Okay,” he said. “I have an idea. You're an artist, right?”

Steve nodded. “Sure.”

“Okay. So do some art.” When Steve started to scoff, Tony said, “No. I mean it. Right here. Do some art.” He tapped a finger against his chin. “JARVIS, can you come up with something sufficiently challenging for Captain Picasso here so he stays out of trouble with the missus?”

“Undoubtedly,” JARVIS replied. “Captain, there have been a number of recent advances in holographic technology which a number of graphic and studio artists are beginning to make use of; if you would care to step in this direction?” He blinked a blue light in one corner of Tony's workshop. “I have calculated that this area is likely to suffer the least damage in case of the accidental explosion of any of Mr. Stark's current prototypes.”

“Good man, JARVIS!” Tony called out. “Let's have some music, too.”

“Of course, sir,” JARVIS replied. He flicked on a holographic projector for Steve to play with, and a nearby screen lit up with several examples of the new kind of holo-art; then he started up one of Tony's favorite playlists. Both men bent to their work.

***

It wasn't that Bucky never left the tower; it was just that he was careful about it. There was absolutely no reason to think that HYDRA wouldn't attempt to reacquire him - they'd spent a lot of time and money turning him into the perfect soldier, after all, and even if Professor Xavier had fixed it so that they couldn't mess up his mind again, they could still put a hell of a hurting on him if they got their hands on him. So he was careful. He never went anywhere without a weapon - Darcy had suggested a taser, but Stark had a few things that were a little more effective - and Stark had implanted a tracker in his right arm that would let him be found regardless of where on the planet he might be taken. He never kept to the same route; even when he took Max to training, they took different ways, sometimes doubling back and sometimes wandering hither and yon before getting where they were going. Bucky Barnes had learned a lesson when it came to HYDRA, and it was the one thing in his life that he could be absolutely certain he would never, ever forget.

Despite the danger, sometimes he went out just to go out. Sometimes he walked Max; sometimes Max walked him; sometimes the two of them just strolled around Manhattan, taking in the changes that had occurred on the island since the 1940s. Max, of course, could not possibly care less about those changes. They still took Bucky by surprise once in awhile, leaving him breathless. Manhattan really had changed an awful lot. He hadn't yet been to Brooklyn; he was almost afraid to go. Steve had mentioned the idea once, but Bucky still wasn't ready to see the old stomping grounds torn down and replaced by whatever they'd been replaced by. Car parks, shiny banks, mini-marts, whatever.

So, on those rare occasions when he went out, Bucky did a lot of walking in Manhattan.

On the afternoon after he schooled Clint Barton on close-up stealth maneuvers ( _again,_ would Barton ever learn?), he decided to take Max out and go for a little walk. He left a note on the fridge, dressed his dog in a vest that identified Max as a service dog in training - Sam had arranged that, after watching Max with Bucky and getting the impression that Max may have already been partially trained before he and Bucky came together - grabbed his favorite hoodie and the new iPod Darcy had recently given him, and headed downstairs in the elevator. 

The sun was shining, though fall weather was threatening to set in, and Bucky turned right out the door, heading south on Park. Max stayed exactly at his side, and Bucky couldn't help but smile, just a little bit, at how well Max was taking to his training. Bucky's memories might be back, but his head was still pretty messed up. Sam and Darcy called it PTSD; Steve called it shell shock, like Bucky's Pa had done; Bucky himself just called it broken. But when Bucky had an episode - sometimes flashbacks, sometimes sudden reversions to the Winter Soldier personality (or lack thereof) - Max was always there to climb into his lap and help keep him calm until it went away.

The service-dog-in-training vest caught a few eyes as they made their way up the sidewalk; that always made Bucky a little nervous. He preferred not to be noticed at all, but he had to admit that the vest also helped; there was a fancy new law that said dogs like Max had to be let inside public buildings and restaurants and things, so if he had a panic attack inside the coffee shop again (crowds were not his favorite thing), Max would be there to help him.

Bucky definitely liked that.

On this particular day, he decided to stop at a new coffee shop that had recently opened up at the corner of Union and  Fifteenth . He'd noticed that they always had funny signs on their outdoor chalkboard, and he had developed an appreciation for people who went out of their way to try and make other people's days better. As he approached the shop, he wound Max's leash a bit tighter around his hand, to keep the dog close, and he paused to appreciate the day's sign. It read,  _TODAY'S SPECIAL: THE TEARS OF OUR ENEMIES._ Bucky snorted softly and stepped inside.

The shop was cool and dimly lit, littered with comfortable-looking furniture, and Bucky made his way up to the counter, looking over the chalkboard on the back wall. He blinked at what he read, surprised, and looked at the girl behind the counter. “Bridies? Like, actual Scottish-style bridies?”

“Yep,” the girl replied, popping the _p_. “The owner's Scottish-from-Scotland, and she makes 'em fresh. You want?”

“I want,” Bucky replied, enthused. “Can I get a large regular whatever kind of coffee with that?”

The girl grinned. “You bet.” She rang him up, retrieving his bridies while he fumbled his wallet out, and then she fixed his coffee after he paid. “Room for cream in the coffee?”

“Black like my soul,” he replied, giving her a wink, and she laughed as she poured the cup full. Then she brought it to him. He was surprised at the sight of an actual diner-style china mug and plate, not the cardboard that it seemed everyone had started to use. “Thanks,” he said as she passed them over the counter.

“You need a hand with that, since you got the dog, too?” she offered.

“Nah, I got it,” he said. “Thanks, though.”

“Sure. Shout if you need anything; I'm Tate.”

“Will do.” He gave her his best smile - he'd been practicing, and it had received Darcy's “one hundred percent not-creepy” seal of approval. Tate smiled back, and Bucky made his way to an empty table by the front window. Max tucked himself easily under the table, and Bucky settled in. He took a bite out of his first bridie and had to stifle an obscene noise of pleasure as the delicious flavor of spiced lamb exploded in his mouth. He was pretty sure he'd made some kind of face, because Tate cracked up behind the counter. He was definitely going to have to start coming here, and often.

He gave Max a few treats - the trainers had scolded him for giving the dog “people food” - while he ate his pastries, and then he sat and enjoyed his coffee and the quiet music that played from the shop's speakers. It was a very relaxing sort of pause in his day - which made it doubly surprising when a young woman with black hair and dark brown eyes walked into the shop, looked around, and then made a beeline straight for his table.

He raised an eyebrow at her when she sat down. “You need something, sister?”

She studied him carefully, an unreadable expression on her face. “Wow. You're really him, aren't you?” she finally said, awe coloring her voice as she sat down uninvited. “We heard, you know, but it was all rumors, nothing substantiated, so we weren't sure what to believe.”

“You might want to start explaining yourself,” Bucky said, keeping his voice and tone casual and his volume low. “You have until the count of five to convince me not to slit your throat.”

She swallowed hard, putting her hands flat on the table quickly. “I'm not here to hurt you,” she said.

“One,” Bucky said.

“I'm not with HYDRA,” she continued, her voice dropping to a hiss. “I swear. I'm with SHIELD.”

“Two,” Bucky said.

Her eyes got huge. “Look, I'm just here to carry a message. I swear.”

“Three,” Bucky said, allowing her to see the knife that was now in his hand. “If you try to run, I'll just put it in your back.”

“Look, please, I swear I'm friendly, - ”

Bucky snorted. “Yeah, 'with SHIELD' and 'friendly' ain't exactly synonyms in my book. Four.”

Her mouth moved soundlessly for a moment. A very strange expression crossed her face, and she blurted, frantically, “Petite shoe!”

He stared at her. “Run that one by me again?”

“Petite shoe? Look, I have no idea what it means, but one of my teammates, his granddad was a Howling Commando - ”

“ _Petit chou_ ,” he corrected her gruffly. “It's French. Means little cabbage.” He studied her face. “Dernier taught it to us, said we could use it to pick up the girls in town. Who's your friend?”

“Antoine Triplett,” she said, reaching up with one trembling hand to wipe at the tiny beads of sweat that had gathered on her forehead. “His granddad was Gabe Jones.”

Bucky slid the knife back into his wrist holster. “You wearin' some kinda wire?”

She nodded, turning her head a little bit and allowing him to see the comm unit in her ear. He studied it for a moment, then held out his hand. “Give it.” When she looked like she wanted to protest, he said, “You either give it to me or I can start counting again.  _You_ came to  _me_ , Sweet Cheeks; we're either doing this my way or you can bleed out on the carpet.” He paused, then added, “I'd hate to have to take option two; this place just opened up, and they don't need that kinda publicity.”

She pulled the comm unit out of her ear and handed it to him. He studied it for a moment, pulled out the multi-tool he kept in his hoodie pocket, and disassembled it. He crushed the tracker with his left hand, then put the rest of the parts and the tool in his pocket. He drained his coffee cup, saluted Tate with it, and stood. “Come on then, girlie,” he said. “You and I are going for a little stroll.”

***

Trip slumped backward in his chair when he heard Barnes correct Skye's French pronunciation. He'd panicked when she blundered her introduction - who knew Skye would be susceptible to that kind of hero worship? She'd always sort of rolled her eyes at Coulson - and only remembered his Granddad's passphrase at the last minute. He closed his eyes, silently thanking his Granddad for all those stories when he was a kid, especially the one where Granddad had told him about how the Commandos had used 'petite shoe' - or, as it turned out,  _petit chou_ \- as a safe-code. Thank God Barnes remembered it.

He exchanged a glance with Coulson when Barnes asked about the comm; when the line went dead and the tracker went blank immediately after, he sat up straight again. “Are we sure this guy's cleared?”

“He's been living in the tower with the Avengers for a few months now,” Coulson said. “And he seems to have free access to come and go as he chooses. Even if the rest of them were stupid, which they're not, Barton and Romanoff would never allow that if he was still a danger.” But he looked wary anyway.

“ _No worries,_ ” May said through her own comm unit. “ _I'm on them. They're leaving the coffee shop._ ”

“Stay with them,” Coulson said unnecessarily.

“ _Heading east on Fifteenth_ ,” May reported. A few minutes later, she said, “ _Turning south on Second._ ” A minute after that, she said, “ _Heading west on Twelfth._ ” And then, barely ten seconds later, she said, “ _What the hell?_ ”

“May?” Coulson said, leaning forward. “What happened?”

There was a very long silence before she spoke again. “ _They're gone._ ”

***

Bucky smirked as he watched the Chinese woman look around in shock. He heard her clearly say, “They're gone,” into her comm, and he resisted the urge to laugh; she'd hear him. He held himself very still instead, keeping his right hand clamped down hard over the girl's mouth. He was fairly certain that she understood about her continued survival hinging on her cooperation, but you never knew when a hostage might decide to do something stupid.

Alleys were not Bucky's favorite thing in the world; he'd slept in quite enough of them during the period between D.C. and getting his memories back, thanks. But one took the opportunities life presented, and when life presented him with a filthy alleyway that was blocked by two dumpsters and provided a great little pathway from Twelfth all the way up to Third, he took the opportunity. He kept the girl still until the Chinese woman looked the other direction, and then he moved, practically dragging her along. He had a plan - admittedly, probably not a very good one, but at the moment, the only one he had.

At Third and Fourteenth, there was a small bodega. He steered the girl in that direction, keeping a close eye out for the Chinese woman, but he was fairly certain that she didn't spot them. He pushed the girl in front of him into the bodega, greeting the shop's owner with a nod and a polite smile, and guided her up one of the aisles. Once he was sure they couldn't be seen from the street, he pulled his phone out of his pocket and called Steve.

Steve picked up immediately, of course. “ _Hey, Buck._ ”

Bucky didn't waste words. “I need an extraction,  _quiet_ , five minutes ago.”

“ _Where are you?_ ” Steve demanded, his voice full of stars and stripes and righteous, towering anger.

“Bodega at Third and Fourteenth. Me and the dog and one, uh... potential asset.”

“ _I'm on the way,_ ” Steve said. “ _Keep the line open._ ”

Less than ten minutes later, a car pulled up in front of the bodega and Steve said into the phone that it was him. The owner had started giving Bucky and his hostage dirty looks, so when Bucky saw Steve get out of the car, he breathed a sigh of relief. He pulled a fifty out of his pocket and dropped it on the counter. “Sorry for the inconvenience,” he said, pushing the door open. He shoved the girl out first, and Steve grabbed her by the arm, pushing her into the car. The dog followed, and Bucky followed the dog, and Steve brought up the rear, pulling the door shut again and locking it.

“Well,” Steve said, eyeballing the girl, “this is different.”

***

“I'm sorry,” Skye said for about the fifth time, fairly wilting under the force of Captain America's disapproving stare. “I didn't mean to freak him out.”

“Why the hell would you even approach him?” Steve demanded. “There are about ten better options that I can think of off the top of my head, and most of them are accessible straight through the Stark Industries switchboard!”

“Because the switchboard can be hacked?” Skye defended. Then she gestured to the Winter Soldier. “And because my boss wanted eyes on him, to verify whether the rumors we've been hearing were true.”

“He's sitting right here, you know,” the Soldier in question said mildly, rubbing his dog's head. “And he can hear you.”

“Sorry,” Skye said again. He just rolled his eyes. 

Steve leaned forward, doing his level best to be as intimidating as possible. “And who's your boss, that it's any of his business?”

“Phil Coulson,” Skye replied, trying to sound defiant and unshaken even as she shrank back into her seat and squirmed under Steve's admittedly terrifying glare. “Director of SHIELD.”

Steve's eyes narrowed. “Phil Coulson is dead,” he said, “and SHIELD no longer exists.”

“He's actually alive,” Skye replied. “If - if he - if you - ” She paused awkwardly, looking over at the Soldier. “What should I call you?”

“Name's Bucky, Sweet Cheeks,” Bucky replied. “You can start with that, if you want.”

“Okay.” She took a deep breath. “ _Bucky_ has my communicator in his pocket. If you were to put it back together, you could actually _talk_ to Phil instead of relying on me.”

“Yeah, we'll keep that in mind,” Steve said, sitting back in his seat.

Skye swallowed nervously. There was silence in the car for a minute before Bucky spoke again. “She says one of her teammates is Gabe's grandkid.”

Steve cocked an eyebrow. “That so?”

“Yeah. Antoine something-or-other. Had a particular code phrase you're familiar with.”

Steve blinked. “Oh?”

“Mhm.” Bucky's lips twitched. “ _Petit chou_.”

Steve choked. “That rotten son of a bitch.”

Bucky cackled. Steve turned away, his face red, and stared out the window, refusing to look at Bucky for the remainder of the ride. Skye felt herself start to sweat again.  _Jesus, Trip_ , she thought to herself,  _ what have you gotten me into? _

Upon arrival at the tower, the Town Car drove them into the building's parking garage and right up to a nondescript service elevator. Steve got out first, and Bucky pointed at Skye. “You next.” She went, and Steve took hold of her by the back of the neck as she climbed out of the car. He said nothing, but the expression on his face told her enough that she didn't even bother to protest. Bucky and Max followed, and when Bucky shut the car's door, the driver pulled away.

Steve turned to the elevator door, placing his hand on a palmprint scanner and then also providing a retinal scan. The door slid open and he pushed Skye none too gently into the car ahead of himself. Bucky and Max came along behind, and Bucky was still wearing that little smirk he'd gotten when he dropped the French phrase on Steve. He also seemed to be humming - Skye tentatively identified the tune as  _ Au clair de la lune _ . She leaned around a scowling Steve to glare at him. “You know, you could at least cut  _ me _ some slack.”

“You came at me like a fuckin'  _ asset _ in a coffee shop full of civilians,” he shot back, his good humor vanishing immediately, replaced by cold steel in his eyes. “Right now, Sweet Cheeks, you ain't got much room to be askin' for favors. Be glad you're still breathing.”

“Enough,” Steve said. The elevator door slid open again, and he guided Skye out of it, up a featureless hallway, and through another door into the main common room, where the rest of the Avengers had assembled. 

Skye stared around herself in shock, taking in the terrifying expressions on every single face. She swallowed hard.  _ Phil Coulson,  _ she thought, _ I swear to God, if I get out of this alive, I'm going to kill you! _


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I just want to make sure that everyone knows there was a one-shot before this story that focused on Clint. The title is _An Arrow to the Heart (Would Have Been Kinder)_. If you haven't read that one-shot, you might want to jump back and give it a look before you read this chapter. It's not mandatory, per se, but it'll give you some background.

Being hauled in front of the assembled Avengers, for Skye, felt a lot like being dragged in front of a court martial. Tony Stark looked like he found the whole thing amusing, giving voice to a chuckle and a “Well, well, isn't  _this_ interesting.”

Bucky took his dog's vest and leash off, letting him loose; the dog immediately trotted across the room to his comfy-looking dog bed in front of the window and settled in for a nap. Bucky then seated himself on one of the tall stools at the kitchen counter beside a slender, attractive Black man Skye did not recognize, who was already there. The rest of the Avengers were arrayed around the room in a rough semicircle: Thor, Black Widow, and Hawkeye on the sofa with Bruce Banner and Tony Stark in the comfy armchairs at either end. Steve maneuvered Skye none-too-gently front and center, and she swallowed hard. She gave them a tentative smile and a weak wave, trying very hard to look non-threatening. “Um. Hi.”

The Black Widow, who had pulled a hunting knife and a whetstone seemingly out of thin air, snorted softly. “The innocent act fools no one,” she said. “Explain yourself, and quickly, or you will die in this room.”

“Jeez, you guys are bloodthirsty,” Skye muttered. “Look, I'm sorry I freaked everyone out, okay? I didn't mean to. My boss sent me to make contact because we were trying to confirm the rumors about whether or not the Winter Soldier had defected and was working with the Avengers. He thought I'd be the least likely person to, I don't know, set off alarms or whatever.”

Hawkeye snorted. “And we see how well that worked out.” He leaned forward, pinning Skye with his gaze. “Why you, though? Why didn't he come himself?”

“Because he's... he's kind of in a weird position,” Skye explained. “He's been working undercover for a couple of years and he's been... um...”

“Dead?” Banner said helpfully. When Skye turned her gaze on him, though, his expression was anything but helpful. In fact, he looked deeply pissed off, and Skye was pretty sure this was not somebody she wanted to piss off. 

“In my defense,” Skye said quickly, “I met him after all that happened.”

“Sir, my apologies,” JARVIS interrupted. “My security protocols are being overridden.”

“Oh, well, this isn't at all familiar,” Tony quipped. He turned toward the main elevator and the others followed suit. When the doors slid open, Skye breathed out a sigh of relief.

Phil, with May and Trip behind him, stepped out of the elevator, Bland Smile #214 on his face. “Good afternoon, Avengers,” Phil said.

There was absolutely no warning; one moment, everyone was calm; the next, Black Widow was standing six inches in front of Phil with the muzzle of a Glock 26 pressed into the soft underside of his jaw. Trip reached for his own weapon, but May's hand fell on his arm, holding him steady.

Phil stared into the Black Widow's eyes for a very long time. He held very still, neither speaking nor moving. After a very long, tense minute, the Black Widow said something in Russian, her voice very soft.

Coulson responded in the same language, just as softly. The Widow spoke again, her tone sharp, and Coulson replied, shaking his head, still soft. She lowered her gun, tucking it into the back of her jeans. Then she said something else, and stepped away from him, giving him a significant look. The Widow seated herself again - and that's when Skye noticed Hawkeye.

Clint Barton had not turned to face the elevator when everyone else had; in fact, he had not moved since JARVIS's announcement about his protocols. He was sitting so very still on the sofa that he could've been a statue, were it not for the faint tremor of strain that ran through his body, and the way his fists, resting on his knees, tensed and released so hard that his knuckles went white again and again. His eyes were focused on the coffee table in front of him, and the expression on his face was... Skye didn't know how to describe it, but it was awful.

Coulson took a half-step forward and said, in a tentative tone Skye had never heard him use before, “Clint?”

Barton surged up out of his seat and fled the room without so much as a backward glance, brushing past Barnes at the kitchen counter and then out through the kitchen's other door. Coulson watched him go, agony in his eyes.

“You should have told him you weren't dead,” Banner said into the terrible silence that followed.

***

If there was ever a moment in which control of the situation needed to be reasserted, Bucky knew it was that one. The look on the suit's face when Barton stormed out of the room was worth investigating further - hell, for that matter, the look on  _Barton's_ face was the one he probably ought to be more concerned with - but now wasn't the time. And he could see from the looks on the others' faces that things were about to devolve into some kind of touchy-feely  _moment_ . Now was definitely not the time.

Bucky cleared his throat very loudly. When the attention of the room shifted to him, he gave them a smile - a particular one that Darcy had ordered him never, ever to use around her again - and spoke. “I'm sure this is an exciting reunion for everyone who gives a rat's ass,” he said, “but since I don't, maybe someone can explain to me why I can't even go to a goddamn coffee shop without incompetent baby honeypots coming at me like I'm about to be recruited to some kind of covert agency.  _Again_ . Because I gotta tell you, boys, after the last time I got 'recruited' to a covert agency, I ain't really feelin' too enthusiastic about the idea.”

There was a long silence before the suit spoke. “Sergeant Barnes,” he said, a weirdly avid look on his face, “My name is Phil Coulson. I'm the director of the Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement and Logistics Division.”

Bucky smirked. “I know what SHIELD is,” he said. “It's a new, more friendly word for HYDRA.”

Coulson had the grace to look abashed. “It is true that we've had some trouble with HYDRA in the recent past,” he said. “But with a little help,” and here he gave a respectful nod to Steve, whose jaw tightened in response, “we've been working on cleaning house. I've recently been tasked by our former director, Nick Fury, with rebuilding the organization from the ground up.” He folded his hands. “The reason why Agent Skye approached you is that we needed to verify that the rumors we'd been hearing about the unexpected turncoating of the Winter Soldier were true, and of all of us, she seemed the least likely to set off any alarms before being able to establish her friendly credentials.”

Steve said, “In other words, you sent her in because you thought he'd be less likely to kill her before she could convince him not to?”

“Essentially, yes.”

“That worked out real well for you,” Bucky snarked. “You'll have to get me tickets to your next big event.”

“Granddad always said Bucky Barnes was the world's biggest smartass.”

Bucky's eyes snapped to the smirking face of the tall black man standing with the Chinese woman he'd eluded on the street. “No question about it,” he said. “I can see Gabe all over you.”

The man grinned. “Ain't like I could pass for one of the Moritas,” he said.

Bucky waved a hand. “I don't mean bein' a Negro,” he said. “I mean you look just like your grandpa. You stand the same way he did, and you got his eyes.”

“We say Black these days, Gramps,” the man said. “People of color, if you're fancy. Or you can just call me Trip, like everybody else does.”

Bucky nodded, filing that away along with the weird expressions people had gotten when he'd said the word  _negro_ . He'd remember to ask Steve about that later - or maybe Darcy. In the meantime, he nodded once at Trip. “Well, if you're as stand-up a guy as your grandpa was, I'll call you any damn thing you wanna be called,” he said. 

“I do my best,” Trip replied, grinning. He studied Bucky for a moment, as though considering, and then he said, “So, look, this whole thing is kinda messed up, yeah? My man Coulson, he's a good man, but he ain't quite got this whole thing figured out just yet. And he's still a little star-struck, so he's probably gonna make a fool out of himself once or twice before he settles down.”

Bucky cocked an eyebrow. “Star-struck?”

“Yeah,” Trip said, grinning, sticking his hands in his pockets. “The Howling Commandos are legends, man. And you? Captain America's best friend Bucky Barnes? I gotta be honest, I'm surprised he's able to string five words together to make a sentence.”

“Yes, thank you, I'm sure this is relevant,” Coulson muttered, his face going a little red.

Bucky sat back, grinning sharply. “Oh, me and Trip can catch up any time, I guess,” he said. “I wanna hear more about this legend stuff.” He folded his arms. “So now you know the rumors are true. The big bad Winter Soldier's gone over to the Americans, and the nightmare has a familiar face. So, now what?”

“I was hoping,” Coulson said, clearly trying to salvage what was left of his dignity, “that we might be able to convince you, and the rest of the Avengers, to work with us.”

Bucky laughed. It was a short, sharp sound, and there was no humor in it. “Not a chance, Suit,” he said flatly. “The rest of these chumps can do whatever they want but as for me? I got enough blood on my hands for twenty guys. I don't need to add any more notches to my gun barrel.”

“Bucky,” Sam murmured beside him, “you know nobody here holds you responsible for - ”

“I know that!” Bucky snapped. “Nobody holds me responsible for things I did when I wasn't me, and that's fine. But things I do now? That _is_ on me.” He pressed his lips together in a thin line, carefully considering his next words. “The last time they wiped me,” he said, turning his eyes on Steve, “have I told you what happened?”

Steve shook his head, not really looking like he wanted to know. Bucky didn't much care; it needed saying. “I'm sitting there on the chair, with the tech repairing my arm, and I had a flashback to when they first installed it.” He took a deep breath. “And I threw the tech across the room. So then all of a sudden shit gets real, right? Now there's, I dunno, six or so guys with Kalashnikovs pointed at me, like they think they can take me out if I get a mind to start cutting up. But I didn't, because I didn't. I just sat there.” He shook his head. “And here comes Pierce, with his goons behind him, and he wants a mission report, and everything... everything that's in my head is you.”

“Me?” Steve asked, blinking. That clearly hadn't been what he'd expected to hear.

“Yeah. You. God only knows how many times they pulled me out of that deep freeze and fried my brains, and you say my name one time and the whole damn house of cards just crumbles.” He laughed softly. “Reckon what that says about me, huh? I always have been a pushover when it came to you, Stevie.”

Steve shook his head, his eyes bright. “Bucky, I...”

Bucky waved a hand. “My point is.” He cleared his throat. “I asked him who you were, and he wouldn't tell me. Just kept talking about the mission. But what he said to me. He said:  _Your work has been a gift to mankind. You shaped the century._ ” He swallowed hard, feeling nauseated at the memory. “ _Society's at a tipping point between order and chaos. Tomorrow morning we're gonna give it a push. But if you don't do your part_ \- by which, Steve, he meant puttin' you in the ground -  _then I can't do mine. And HYDRA can't give the world the freedom it deserves_ .”

A collective shiver went up the spines of everyone who heard him say that - possibly because he'd done it in the blankest Winter Soldier voice he could manage without giving himself a flashback. He let it sit for a minute, his eyes tracking from Sam to Trip to Coulson to Steve to Skye and then back to Coulson, flicking briefly across the others as he went. “So you'll forgive me, Director Suit Guy, if I tell you in the most polite of terms that for my part, you can take your shadow organization and your claims of being on the right side this time, and roll 'em up real tight and shove 'em up your ass. I'm through bein' anybody's trigger-boy.”

“Then maybe,” Coulson said into the silence that followed, “you would allow us to be yours.”

Bucky blinked. “Sorry, what?”

Coulson smiled slightly. “We have a common goal, Sergeant Barnes. The Avengers have declared war on HYDRA. You, yourself, have what I might politely term a bone to pick with them. And SHIELD's original mission was to oppose HYDRA and any similar threats to world peace and security. So perhaps we can work together.”

“That's why we needed to know if you were really you,” Skye interjected, the first time she'd spoken since Coulson's arrival. Bucky cocked an eyebrow at her, and she clarified, “Not Bucky, I mean, although, you know, we did want to know about that. But the Winter Soldier. Because the sheer amount of intel you probably have - names, faces, base locations, all of that. Right? I mean, we've got a list of actions we're pretty sure can be attributed to you, and you've been _all over_. So you've got to know where some of the good stuff is, right?”

“We are a mobile tactical command and response team,” Coulson said, picking up the thread again. “Our primary function is threat neutralization. We have transport, weaponry, and even a small but feisty science and tech team.” He took a deep breath. “My point is that we can work together on this.”

“The enemy of my enemy is my friend?” Sam interjected quietly. “Yeah, I don't think that's how this works.”

“Birdman Junior's right,” Tony said. “You're standing here in the middle of our home, after sending an agent - however incompetent - to try and bring the Winter Soldier over to your side, after _two years_ of leaving us all thinking you're dead, and suddenly you want us to trust you?”

“You want us to trust you,” Bruce continued, “with the welfare and safety of a man who is not only our team leader's best friend, but who was until very recently a victim of torture and brainwashing at the hands of, well, let's just say it, shall we? At the hands of SHIELD itself.”

“SHIELD and HYDRA are not the same,” Coulson tried to defend himself. “Yes, SHIELD was infiltrated, but - ”

“Tony,” Steve interrupted, “how many divisions are there of Stark Industries?”

“Oh, tons,” Tony replied easily. “R&D, PR, InfoTech, Personnel, Legal, Accounting, MedTech, ...” He trailed off for a moment, counting on his fingers, before waving a hand. “A bunch.”

“And of course R&D is very different from, say, Legal,” Steve continued, looking for all the world as though Stark Industries's corporate structure was a topic of supreme interest to him. “So would you agree that they're entirely different companies?”

“Why, no, Steven, I don't believe that I would,” Tony replied, smiling beatifically. “In fact, considering that they're both ruled over by the extremely well-manicured iron fist of our beloved overlady, Pepper Potts, I don't believe I'd say that at all.”

“Well, gosh, Tony,” Steve said, leaning against the wall and putting on his best wide-eyed-yokel face. “That's almost like saying that since Alexander Pierce was in control of both SHIELD and HYDRA, and SHIELD was staffed in large part by HYDRA goons, that SHIELD and HYDRA are basically the same thing.”

“Huh.” Tony rubbed at his chin. “Well, funny you should say that, Steve, since that's kind of exactly what I was thinking.”

“Well, golly,” Steve said mildly.

“I thought that was supposed to be my line,” Bucky protested.

“No, you're the kid sidekick,” Sam corrected him. “You're supposed to come out with lines like 'Holy Contributing to the Delinquency of Minors, Cap!'”

“No, that's Robin,” Bruce argued. “Comic-Bucky always had those stupid golly-gosh-gee-whillikers exclamations.”

“I think we might be a little off-topic,” Skye interjected.

“Just slightly,” Coulson agreed. “Sometimes it's like herding cats.”

“The point we're making, Agent Zombie,” Tony said, his voice taking on a hard edge even as he leaned back casually in his chair, “is that there's not anybody on our team who trusts you as far as the non-superpowered among us can throw you. So whatever you thought was going to happen when you came in here, you can forget about it.”

Coulson cast an unperturbed look at Bucky. “You're not an Avenger,” he said calmly. “Does Stark speak for you?”

“I might not be an Avenger,” Bucky replied, his eyes narrowing and his metal fist clenching, “but I am a goddamn Howling Commando, and the last time I checked, Bucky fuckin' Barnes takes his orders from Steve Rogers.” Then he smirked. “Besides, what are you offerin' me that Stark ain't got? Transport? Weaponry? Science and tech? I'm sittin' pretty in a tower built by the guy who invented half the shit you're tryin' to sell me on.”

“Three quarters,” Tony corrected him.

“So it seems like to me that what you _actually_ want is for _me_ to help _you,_ ” Bucky continued. “Am I right? You've got the reins now - or, what's more likely, somebody dumped 'em on you and you don't know what else to do besides take 'em and try to make the best of 'em - and you need a mission. What better mission than to clean up HYDRA, right? I mean, that's how the Commandos got famous. Hell, they put us in the fuckin' Smithsonian. Big, fancy exhibit with the Cap's face on the wall and fancy mannequins and shit, yeah? If it worked for us back in the day, it oughta work for you, too. Is that what you're thinkin'?”

From the look on Coulson's normally expressionless face - a look that kind of looked like he'd gotten a mouthful of raw egg - it was clear that Bucky was right. Steve nodded. “So that's your play,” he said softly. “You heard the rumors about the Winter Soldier and you came looking to see what kind of intel he could give you. And then what, Agent Coulson? You discovered he was really Bucky Barnes, and you had a - what's Darcy call it? A fangirl moment?”

“Or maybe,” Bruce interjected, “that isn't it at all.”

The others turned to look at him, and he had a smile on his face that wasn't very pleasant. “I mean, we've seen this happen before, right? The subject is dangerous, so we'll send in an attractive young woman to try and convince him to come in quietly.” He cast an apologetic glance at Natasha. “She'll seem harmless, so maybe it won't trigger whatever murderous impulses still reside in him; we can get the man, and not the monster. And then, once we have him in custody, we have a specially-built cage just for him where we can put him if he flexes his muscles.” He bared his teeth in an approximation of a grin. “Am I right, Agent Coulson? I mean, that is SHIELD's typical pattern, after all.”

“Absolutely not,” Coulson said immediately, but it was obvious by the thick silence following his denial that none of the Avengers believed him.

Bucky felt his breath start coming short. He slid off his stool and moved, seating himself in the floor near Steve's feet. “Max,” he said softly. The dog got up, coming to him immediately and climbing into his lap. He used both hands - which, he noticed absently, were shaking - to rub and stroke at the dog's head and neck, focusing his entire being on staying calm. Steve shifted slightly so that his leg pressed against Bucky's left shoulder, giving him an anchor.

“I think,” Steve said, “we have arrived at that point in the discussion where there really isn't any point in continuing. The answer, Agent Coulson, is no. You can't have him. There's nothing you can offer him that would induce him to give himself up, and I can't speak for anyone else, but you'll take him forcibly over my dead body. Do you understand?”

“Captain,” Coulson said, “I never had any intention of trying to take him forcibly. Please believe me.”

“Why should he?” Natasha said. It was the first time she had spoken since the brief Russian exchange earlier. “Why should any of us believe anything you have to say? Fury told us you were dead, and that's on Fury, but you certainly haven't made any efforts to clear up the situation in the two years since.”

“I was working undercover,” Phil began but Natasha cut him off with a wave of her hand.

“Undercover, _pah_!” She made a spitting sound. “You and I both know there are a thousand ways of sending up an undetected signal from undercover. All the mail drops are still in place; all you had to do was send a postcard. But you didn't. You were with him for _eight years_ , Coulson, and you didn't think he deserved to know you weren't dead?”

“Of course he deserved to know!” Coulson exclaimed. “But I couldn't. There was more at stake than just me or just him.”

“Was there?” Natasha said softly. “Or is that just the lie you tell yourself so that you can sleep at night?” She shook her head. “Do you know how close we came to losing him, Phil? Do you know how many nights he woke himself up screaming your name? Do you know that for months, JARVIS kept him monitored twenty-four hours a day with one of Tony's suits at the ready in case he decided to jump off a ledge?” She paused. “Do you even care?”

Phil's jaw was tight when he spoke again. “I care,” he managed.

“Well, you've got a fucked up way of showing it,” Tony interjected.

For the first time, Thor spoke up. “This conversation has lost any semblance of productivity,” he said firmly. “I suggest that we adjourn until a later time, perhaps when all heads are cooler and more able to advance with diplomacy.”

“That sounds like an excellent suggestion,” Trip said.

“Leave us your card,” Tony said. “We'll call you if we decide we're ready to talk more. Oh, and, Agent?” He waited for Coulson to look at him before speaking again. “That was your last free attack on my AI. This building is armed. The next time you try to circumvent my security and force your way into my home uninvited, you'll be shot where you stand. Is that understood?”

Coulson nodded once, tightly. “Understood, Mr. Stark.”

“Thank you,” Tony said, cool and emotionless. “You and your _compadres_ can show yourselves out.”

Once they were gone, Steve dropped to one knee, his hand coming to rest on Bucky's shoulder. “You okay?” he asked softly. “How's the weather?”

Bucky nodded, not looking up from his dog. “Cloudy,” he said. “Chance of storms.”

The weather analogy had been Sam's idea; even though Xavier had helped Bucky to re-integrate his memories with the different, fractured parts of his personality, it was sometimes still very difficult for him to name and identify his emotions, much less grapple with them on a hard day. So, at Sam's suggestion, they had begun using weather forecasts as metaphors for whatever was going on inside Bucky's head at any given moment. It was surprisingly effective, especially on the days when Bucky had trouble communicating.

Steve gave Bucky's shoulder a careful squeeze, just above the seam where metal met flesh. “Let me know if it changes, or if there's anything I can do to help, okay?”

Bucky nodded again. “'M okay,” he murmured.

Steve reached down and gave Max a quick scratch behind the ear. “Good boy, Max,” he murmured. Then he stood up again. “JARVIS,” he said, “Where's Clint?”

“Agent Barton is in the shooting range,” JARVIS replied.

“No surprise,” Natasha said. “I'll go get him.”

“When he's calm enough to have a rational discussion,” Tony said, “bring him up here. I have some ideas, and I want everyone to be part of the conversation.”

Natasha nodded, then vanished down the staircase on the way to the gymnasium.

Thor pushed himself up off the couch and began pacing by the window. “This turn of events is most distressing,” he said. “I can understand the purpose of Fury's actions; by telling us that the son of Coul was dead, we were provided with a true motive to come together as a team. But why not tell us the truth afterward? Why leave us all unknowing? Especially Clint. I cannot understand what possible purpose could have been served by leaving him to mourn his shieldmate for so long.”

“It's a dick move, that's for sure,” Sam agreed. “Me and Riley, we weren't even together like that, and if I found out he was alive and didn't tell me? I'd be all kinds of pissed off.”

Bucky raised his head, looking up at Steve suddenly with that strange childlike expression he sometimes wore. “You sore at me for that, Stevie?” he asked, his voice soft.

“No way, Buck,” Steve replied, his voice firm. “That wasn't your fault. It's a totally different situation.”

Bucky's eyes searched Steve's for a long moment before he finally nodded. “'Kay,” he said, looking down at his dog again. Steve reached over and stroked Bucky's head gently, his fingers sliding through the still-long hair. Bucky leaned back into the touch gratefully.

The room was quiet for a few minutes, each person lost in their own thoughts. Finally, the elevator door slid open and Clint stepped out, followed by Natasha. His expression was hard, his eyes shuttered and his mouth a grim line in his face. “All right,” he said, striding into the room. “Let's talk.”


	3. Chapter 3

Phil Coulson sighed softly as the elevator began to descend. “Well, that definitely could have gone better.”

“That's an understatement,” Melinda May replied.

Skye looked down at her shoes. “I'm sorry,” she said. “I really thought I'd be okay, but I got nervous, and then when I realized he wasn't kidding about killing me...”

Trip reached out and clapped her on the shoulder. “Don't sweat it,” he said, grinning. “Nobody died. Everybody blows at least one op in their life. If this one was yours, you got it out of the way.”

May snorted a soft laugh at that. Coulson just sighed again.

Skye shook her hair back, raising her head. She took a deep breath and squared her shoulders. “All right,” she said. “What's our next move?”

“We wait,” Coulson said. “They'll come around.”

“You sure about that?” May asked with a raised eyebrow.

Coulson nodded. “That's the thing about the Avengers - all of them. They may be erratic and bad with authority but when it comes down to the line, they'll do what's right  _because_ it's right. That's what makes them so very, very special.”

“They're all right on the edge of bugnuts,” Skye translated, “but at least they're on our side.”

Coulson's lips twitched. “That sounds accurate.”

“My Granddad always said that's why they were called the _Howling_ Commandos,” Trip interjected. “Because it wouldn't have been good publicity to straight-out call them _Those Batshit Crazy Motherfuckers_ , so they went with the metaphor instead.”

“Something about Barnes isn't right,” May commented after a moment of contemplative silence. “He seems okay on the surface, but underneath...” She shook her head.

Coulson cocked his eyebrow. “You think he's struggling?” he asked as the elevator reached the lobby.

“I think if the Bucky Barnes I learned about in school really was the Winter Soldier all this time, there's a story there that we haven't heard, and it's bigger than just 'former Soviet asset decides to defect to the West'. _Much_ bigger.”

“I was wondering about that myself,” Skye said. “I mean... Bucky _Barnes_? Captain America's right hand man and best friend since childhood is the Winter Soldier? That just... something's not right there.”

“I want you to get on that leaked information,” Coulson said to Skye as they stepped outside into the afternoon sunlight. “Comb it for references to James Buchanan Barnes, the Winter Soldier, and any related keywords you can think of. See what you can dig up for us.”

“On it,” Skye said.

***

“Okay, what? Wait, _what_?!” 

Steve ran a hand through his hair, leaning back in the shower to rinse the shampoo out. “I know. Believe me, I was  _there_ . I  _know_ .”

Darcy stood at the other end of the shower stall, thick plastic comb in hand, hair plastered flat to the top of her head where she'd been combing her conditioner through it when Steve started telling her the story of the afternoon she'd missed. She'd known something had happened - Bucky was far too out of sorts for the day to have been normal - but Bucky didn't want to talk about it, and Steve didn't want to rehash it in front of him, so they'd spent the evening playing Uno instead. After Bucky went to bed, Steve and Darcy started their own evening routine, and once they were safely in the shower, with the water pounding down on the marble tile, Steve had begun telling the story. 

“You know,” Darcy said after taking a moment to pull herself together, “I never liked Phil Coulson.”

Steve raised an eyebrow. “You didn't?”

“No.” She paused, cocking her head. “Did you meet him, before everything happened?”

“Briefly,” Steve replied. He thought about it as he rubbed conditioner into his scalp. “It was on one of the SHIELD jets, heading out to the helicarrier. He was the agent sent to retrieve me. He gave me a tablet with a bunch of information about Bruce, and we talked about that for a minute, and then he got... Well, frankly, he got a little creepy.”

Darcy's eyebrows crept up toward her hairline. “Creepy how?”

He chewed his lip for a moment, trying to decide how best to describe it. “He started talking about how it was an honor to meet me, which, okay, that happens a lot, and I've... sort of gotten used to it.”

“Liar,” she teased gently.

“Okay, not really.” He grinned, grabbing his soap. “But then he started talking about how he was watching me when I was asleep - and I know he meant right after they took me out of the ice, and I'm pretty sure it's just because he happened to be the agent assigned to be there, but... I don't know. It was just...” He paused, rinsing, and finally said, lamely, “It just made me very uncomfortable.”

“Steve, baby,” Darcy said, “I'm a woman with a huge rack. You don't have to defend yourself to me; being in situations where creepy men make me uncomfortable is like a bi-weekly experience.”

“I'd like to say that it makes me feel better to know that someone understands how I feel, but that kind of just makes me angry.”

“Tell me about it,” Darcy replied, slipping around him to claim the spray for herself. 

***

Sometimes, Steve wondered what Dr. Burke did to cope. Being the therapist to a recently-defrosted World War Two super-soldier and a deeply traumatized sharpshooting archer could not possibly be an easy job. He said as much, the first time he had an appointment after Bucky's return. Burke had only laughed that soft, non-judgmental laugh and assured Steve that he had a variety of both healthy and unhealthy coping mechanisms all ready and waiting to be deployed as necessary.

The day after Phil's visit, Steve left Bucky in Stark's lab letting the engineer do arcane things to his arm, and dragged Clint uptown to Burke's office. The doctor was able to work Clint in before Steve's scheduled appointment, and Steve gave the archer a firm look as the doctor showed him in. Clint rolled his eyes at him. “Yes,  _mom_ ,” he snapped, pushing the door shut firmly behind him. Steve sat back and sighed softly. 

Burke was a good guy. Steve was confident enough to say that, after a solid nine months of therapy, he knew that Burke was a good guy, a decent guy, who cared about his patients and genuinely wanted the best for everyone he came into contact with. Steve trusted him with his secrets, and trusted him enough that he'd recommended him to Clint as well. Now he was glad he'd done so; after the events of the previous day, Clint was going to need someone to talk to.

He sat back in his chair, pulling his book out of his pocket. It was one Darcy had recommended to him; a biography of a well-known Mexican-American activist from the 1960s. He found himself fascinated by the widespread agitation and protest during that era and he wondered, sometimes, what he would have done if he had been present for it all.

Would he have donned the uniform, boarded a plane, flown halfway around the world to carry his shield through a tropical jungle? Or would he have stood on a platform with his shield on his back, adding his voice to those already raised in protest? He had a feeling he knew what he would do; the same thing he had always done. Stand up against bullies and tyrants regardless of which side they were on. Because that was what he did - that was who he was.

He read quietly until the office door opened again; when Clint came out, his face was blotchy and his eyes were red, but he looked like he felt better than he had in weeks. Steve gave the archer a nod as he came out, tossing himself into a chair to wait while Steve had his appointment. Burke gave Steve a welcoming smile, and the soldier stood, tucking his book back into the pocket of his jacket before entering the well-appointed office.

Burke pushed the door shut and crossed the room, seating himself in the wing chair across from the one Steve favored. “We haven't spoken in some time,” he said. “How is everything?”

“Whew.” Steve dropped into the chair and blew out a breath. “Where do I even start?”

“Well,” Burke replied, smiling slightly, “in your last few visits, you've been involved in the downfall of a major extra-governmental organization, recovered the brother you thought was dead, discovered that he'd been tortured and mentally damaged, and he is now living with you and your girlfriend.”

“Yeah, okay, it's been a busy few months,” Steve said, a sheepish smile crossing his face. He rubbed at his face. “I have to admit that Bucky's still the biggest challenge in my life, even since Professor Xavier fixed his memories. I think...” He paused, considering what he was about to say. It was something he'd been working around the edges of for some time now. He chose his words carefully. “I think... that I had an expectation that things would be a certain way, and they're not, and I'm struggling to cope with the difference between expectation and reality.”

Burke raised an eyebrow. “So, last time, when you said that Bucky was basically himself again?”

“Well.” Steve rubbed his face again, scratching at his jaw thoughtfully. “He is, and yet at the same time, he's not. He's still... I mean, he's not _fixed_ , you know? He's been through a lot. He's changed some. There's still a lot of the old Bucky there, but the things he's been through... they made him darker. Heavier, maybe.” He sighed. “He has days where he's very like his old self, and then sometimes he has days where he's really, really not. Sometimes things trigger personality changes; like, for example, if he gets too frustrated, he might shut down and stop talking, or he might get... almost childlike. And on top of that, he's got a lot of the same problems I have. Flashbacks and things.”

“How does that make you feel?”

“Ugh.” Steve sat forward, running a hand through his hair and resting his elbows on his knees. “I don't like it, Doc. I don't like it at all. It's bad enough when it's me, you know? I can do stuff about it when it's me. But when it's him, it's like... I can't fight it. I can't stop it. I can't fix it. He's got his therapy and we - me and Darcy - we help as much as we can, but... God, I would give anything for a time machine, you know? To go back and find him out there before they got hold of him and just... just take care of him. Keep him safe. But I can't, and I just feel so... powerless.” He looked down at his hands, then back up at Burke. “Like, my whole reason for doing what I did was to fight against people like HYDRA and Zola, and keep people safe from the things they did. And I couldn't even protect Bucky. I couldn't then, and I can't now, and I just feel like such a fuckin' failure sometimes.”

“Do you understand that it's not your fault?”

“Intellectually, yes,” Steve replied. “I've been able to separate that out, at least. I can... I can look at the situation, any one specific situation, and say 'Well, you know, if that had been Tony or Clint or Natasha and this had happened I wouldn't blame them, because there was nothing in their power that could be done to stop it.'” He paused, giving Burke a slight, bitter smile. “And then I sit with Bucky and hold him down while he has a flashback, or I watch him get so locked up in his head that he can't even speak, and I just...” He sighed. “It's hard to be objective when that happens.”

“Being objective is often difficult, especially in the heat of a situation like that. It might be helpful to keep in mind that, while there was nothing you could have done to prevent what has happened - you were, after all, under several hundred feet of sea ice at the time - you are currently doing everything you can to help alleviate the situation. So focus on that. In fact,” Burke paused, getting a particular smile on his face that Steve recognized as his homework face, “I want you to make a list of all the things you've done to help Bucky since you first saw him on the street in Washington. Everything that you can think of, even if it was something as small as bringing him a glass of water or tossing him a pencil from across the room.”

“Oh, jeez, Doc,” Steve said, cringing a little. “You don't pull your punches, do you?”

And Burke grinned then, a full-on, tooth-bearing grin. “You wouldn't want me to, would you, Cap?”

***

There was something about being in Tony's lab that was soothing to Bucky's hindbrain. He'd thought, at first, that it was because it was so similar to the HYDRA labs where he was accustomed to spending most of his time; surrounded by tech, being poked and prodded at in preparation for going into or just after coming out of cryo. It was familiar, and thus calming.

And then one day, as he sat at Stark's spare workbench with JARVIS and U teaching him how to solder a circuit board, he'd realized that it was actually the opposite. Being in Stark's workshop was absolutely  _nothing_ like being in a HYDRA lab. For one thing, HYDRA's scientists had never blasted hair bands at a hundred decibels; they didn't have bots with personalities running around carrying smoothies and tearing things up, either. 

That was one thing that was  _really_ different from anything Bucky had ever experienced before. Everything in Stark's workshop seemed to have some kind of a basic personality. Even the coffee maker had a rudimentary sense of sarcasm, and the microwave wouldn't work unless you said please. HYDRA wouldn't have allowed that sort of thing for even a second; hell, they'd even wiped their pet assassin clean of almost every spark of personal essence, and he'd been a human being before they got hold of him.

Most days, he rather enjoyed the sensation of being a human again. There were, of course, times when he - in Darcy's words - forgot how to person, but they weren't terribly frequent, and he usually came out of them fairly quickly. It helped when he had something to do, some task to occupy his time. Art was great, and he was pretty good at it, but unlike Steve, he had never been capable of losing himself in art for any great length of time. Sometimes he went to the labs with Darcy and helped out, but the science was way over his head and one of Jane's home-built machines had a tendency to short out when he got around it with his arm. He enjoyed cooking, and Thor was teaching him how to use the herbs and things that came from Asgard, but it was tough to fill an entire day with cooking, even for their group.

Exercise was good, and Bruce was teaching him how to meditate, but the one time he'd taken Natasha up on her offer to spar, it had ended with him in tears in a corner, flashing back to her childhood, and neither of them was interested in repeating the experience. Sparring with Steve was less fraught, because he remembered teaching Steve to box when they were little, but it wasn't fair for Steve to feel like he needed to entertain Bucky all the time, especially when he had his own work to do, helping Darcy set up the new version of SHIELD (Tony wanted to call it SWORD) that was going to be under the umbrella of Stark Industries. Bucky wasn't sure how that was turning out, so far, but Steve was neck-deep in it so it was probably going to be okay.

So, somehow, Bucky had ended up wandering down to Stark's workshop one afternoon when he didn't have anything else to do. Stark had been after him to come down and let him run diagnostics on the arm, “just to be sure it wasn't damaged” - which Bucky was pretty sure was code for _I want to get inside of it and see how it works_ \- and so Bucky decided to take him up on it. 

Stark did in fact run the diagnostics he'd been talking about, a task which had involved wiring Bucky's arm to a computer and then talking at him about all kinds of random things for over an hour. By the time it was done, Bucky had gained an appreciation for eighties metal bands and one of Stark's bots had developed a crush on Bucky's arm. And then Stark had said, “So what do you actually know about your arm?”

Bucky had looked down at it, then back up at Stark, and said, “It's an arm?”

What followed was a crash course in robotic engineering that probably would have left an MIT graduate student weeping in a corner. Bucky found that he had a pressing personal interest in the matter, though, and so he pushed himself to keep up, asking JARVIS to help him find extra reading on the topic and struggling to learn. Once Stark realized Bucky was serious about it, that he really wanted to know and was willing to put in the effort, he slowed down, backing up and presenting the work in bite-sized chunks along with hands-on projects so that he could really assimilate what he was doing.

And that was how it came to pass that Bucky Barnes found himself, the morning after Coulson's visit, sitting at Stark's spare worktable - which was rapidly becoming his own worktable - with his dog at his feet and Butterfingers occasionally passing by, making cow eyes at his left arm. “Stark, your robot's makin' my arm feel uncomfortable again,” Bucky called out. “This is definitely turning into a yellow-light situation over here.”

Stark leaned around a bank of shelving. “How do you even know about yellow-light situations? Who's been talking to you about sexual harassment in the workplace? Because that's gotta stop. I can't have assistants who know about their rights under federal workplace safety laws.”

“Saw it on the Internet,” Bucky said. This had become his standard response whenever Tony expressed astonishment that Bucky knew about modern things. Tony wasn't actually curious; he only wanted to poke fun, and Bucky saw no need to reward that sort of behavior with attention. 

But it didn't look like Tony was going to let this one go. “You... what, you saw a sexual harassment seminar on the Internet?” he asked, sounding incredulous.

Bucky shrugged. “It was sort of an accident? You know how sometimes you start reading things and you click links and then you click other links and you wind up someplace you never expected?”

“Sure, that's the best part about the Internet,” Tony replied. “I find the best porn that way.”

Bucky rolled his eyes slightly, placing a tiny dot of solder in the precise spot indicated by JARVIS's holographic arrow. “Well, I was looking at stuff on Tumblr, and there was a quote from an article that got me interested, so I clicked the link. And then I clicked another link, and then another one, and that one took me to the seminar. But it wasn't a real seminar; someone had done a mockup of what they said a real seminar ought to look like.”

Tony scratched his forehead, leaving a streak of grease behind. “What I can't figure out, aside from how you even know about Tumblr in the first place, is what possible combination of links could have led you there.”

Bucky shrugged. “Darcy showed it to me. She likes pictures of Sherlock and Doctor Who. I like nature porn.” He paused, then looked up. “No, Tony, that does not mean people making porn outdoors. It's pictures of the world and all the beautiful things out there.” He looked back down again, placing another dot of solder. “I like looking at pretty things.”

Tony stood there staring at him for a long minute, but Bucky didn't look up again. He recognized the silence; it was the kind that resulted in most people giving him those horrible  _sympathetic_ looks that he couldn't stand. Or Steve just staring at him with those huge, wounded eyes. He couldn't help it if the things he said sometimes reminded people that he'd been through some hard shit; that was his life, and he wasn't going to censor himself to spare Tony Stark's delicate feelings.

But then Tony surprised him. “Wait a second,” he said. “I've seen the kinds of things that come off Tumblr. Barnes, are you telling me you've been reading  _feminist blogs_ ?”

“So what if I have?” Bucky asked, setting aside the soldering iron and sitting up. “You ask me, it's about fuckin' time people started sayin' this shit. You know, I was three years old when women got the right to vote in this country. My Ma, she was an agitator. I used to have a picture of her holdin' up a sign at a rally. And she used to tell my sister that someday there'd be a time when women in this country were considered just as good as men. Well, it's been ninety-something years since my Ma held up that sign, and when Darcy tells me about how she carries that taser because she can't go on the damn subway without some asshole grabbin' her boobs or her ass, I'm thinkin' that day my Ma talked about ain't here yet. So yeah, I'm reading feminist blogs, and I'm startin' to think maybe more guys should.”

Tony stared at him. Bucky stared back. There was a long silence. Finally, Tony spoke. “You know,” he said, “except for yesterday, that might be the most I've ever heard you speak in one sitting.”

Bucky snorted. “Don't get used to it. And tell your robot to stop comin' over here tryin' to look up my arm's skirt. It's disrespectful.” He picked up the soldering iron and returned to his work, determined to ignore Tony for the rest of the day.

After he finished building his circuit board, JARVIS made him take a break. He was only allowed to sit for so long before he had to get up and engage in some kind of physical activity; Dr. Banner was concerned about things like ligament strength and muscle fatigue and bone density loss because of his years in and out of cryo. He stood, stretching out his back, and patted his thigh; at this signal, Max came trotting along with him, and he wandered out of the workshop and down the hall to the astrophysics lab.

Dr. Foster, who Bucky privately thought was nutty as a fruitcake, was in her lab, working at one of the machines, but Darcy was not there. Bucky tapped on the window and waved a friendly hello; Dr. Foster waved back, but did not invite him in, so he did not enter. He just paused long enough to make the new lab assistant nervous, then continued on his way. If Darcy wasn't in the lab, he knew where she'd be: the new offices on sixty-five.

When the elevator opened on the sixty-fifth floor, Bucky stopped and stared in shock. The last time he'd been down there, the place had been wide open and almost echoingly empty; now, it was anything but. There were workstations scattered all over the place, interspersed with seating areas with couches and chairs where people could - and some already were - sitting and talking together, sharing information and looking at one another's portable computers. All along the northern end of the floor, planters had been installed under the windows, so that the place was filled with the smell of wet dirt and green, growing things. One fairly large section on the west end had been walled off; Bucky assumed higher-clearance activities would take place in there. The eastern side had been turned into offices; while they were totally enclosed, the offices were glassed in, providing transparency along with privacy.

Bucky stepped out of the elevator and found himself inside a very interesting area. His strategist's mind recognized it immediately as containment. Perhaps ten feet square, the area was demarcated by glass half-walls and lined with comfortable-looking seating. There was only one way from the containment area into the main office area, and that was past a very skinny young man wearing thick black plastic-rimmed glasses and a tan suede jacket with dark brown elbow patches. Bucky would have bet any amount of money that the young man's entire purpose in life was to guard a panic button.

The young man looked up from his own portable computer as Bucky stepped forward. “I'm sorry, sir,” he said, not sounding sorry at all, “but this is a no-pets floor.”

“He's a service dog,” Bucky replied, pointing at Max's red vest. “And anyway, I'm looking for Darcy Lewis.”

“Do you have an appointment?”

“Why do I need an appointment?”

“Because Ms. Lewis is an extremely busy woman,” the young man replied, his tone growing slightly haughty, “and she doesn't have time to see everyone who wanders in off the street.”

Bucky felt his metal fist clench. For a long moment, he would have liked nothing better than to put that fist right through this young man's smug, pretentious face. But he tamped the reaction down, recognizing it as nothing more than garden-variety frustration (compounded by the young man's attitude). Instead of doing something stupid, he reached into his pocket and pulled out his cell phone.

He noticed that the young man tensed when he did that; he was glad he hadn't given in to his initial impulse to just shove past the desk and go looking himself. Undoubtedly that would have ended poorly. He touched a few buttons on the glass front of the phone Tony had given him and then lifted it to his ear, listening as it rang.

A moment later, the line was picked up. “Hey, Bucky!” Darcy's voice said. “What's up?”

“I want to come and see you,” Bucky said. “But he won't let me.”

“Who won't let you?” Darcy asked.

“This guy. I don't know. He said I can't bring Max and he won't let me come and see you. He says I have to have an appointment.” He took a deep breath, closing his eyes to focus. “It's very frustrating.”

“Oh, Bucky, are you on sixty-five trying to come to my office?”

“Yes.”

“Okay. The guy at the desk, with the hipster glasses and the attitude problem, that's Kevin. He has a list of people who are allowed back without an appointment; you're on it. Just tell him your name.”

Bucky opened his eyes and turned to the young man. “Are you Kevin? Darcy says to tell you I'm on a list and I don't have to have an appointment.”

Kevin poked at his computer's screen. “What's your name?”

“Bucky Barnes.”

Kevin held up a hand, pointing to the northeastern corner of the building. “Ms. Lewis's office is all the way in that far corner. One moment.” He typed something, then said, “Go ahead.”

Bucky said, “Thank you,” and moved past the young man's desk. Max followed. Once he was into the office area itself, he spoke into the phone again. “Okay. Far northeastern corner?”

“Yep. Come on back.”

“Okay.” Bucky hung up the phone, pocketing it, and wound his way past desks and couches and chairs and a coffee station. By the time he got to Darcy's office, she was standing in the doorway, dressed in jeans and a blue scoop-neck top with a short jacket over it. She gave him a bright smile and a quick hug. “Nice job with the feelings I.D., Scruffy,” she told him, reaching up to muss at his hair. “Kevin is _hella_ frustrating. That's why we hired him.”

“Can you go to Max's training with me?” Bucky asked.

“Of course,” Darcy replied immediately. “When do you need to leave?”

Bucky shrugged. “It's at two. I thought maybe we could have lunch on the way.”

“That sounds great,” she said. “I haven't eaten since ass o'clock this morning. Let me grab my bag.” She ducked into her office, retrieving the bag in question, and then came back out. Bucky offered his arm and she took it, grinning broadly. “Well then,” she said. “Allons-y!”

“Oui,” Bucky replied. “Nous allons.”


	4. Chapter 4

Darcy kept her hand on Bucky's arm as they walked; for him, she knew, it was less about being gentlemanly and more about needing an anchor. She didn't mind; she'd pretty much volunteered for it anyway. She let him lead the way down the sidewalk, knowing how he was about taking circuitous routes, and walked in companionable silence with him until they stopped in front of a small taquería in Gramercy Park. “Here,” he said. “I want to try tacos.”

Darcy grinned. “Have you not had tacos yet? Oh, Bucky. You're going to _love_ tacos.”

“They have all-you-can-eat tacos here,” Bucky said, pointing at the sign.

“That must have been a miscalculation on their part,” Darcy mused, grinning and following him inside. The interior of the taquería was cool and dim, and decorated in the usual style with brightly colored tiles and adobe walls. A smiling waiter seated them, introduced himself as Mateo, gave them menus, and took their drink orders. A few moments later, he was back with Darcy's soda and Bucky's water, and then the waiter asked for their food orders.

“We want the all-you-can-eat special,” Darcy said. “My friend is from Russia, and has never had tacos before.”

The waiter's eyes went wide and round. “Really?” he asked. “Dude.”

Bucky grinned. “It is true,” he said, grinding the words out in a Chechnyan accent.

The man grinned back. “Well, damn,” he said. “All right, let's start you off small, with some plain old beef and chicken hard tacos; if you like those, we'll try something else on the next platter.”

“Sounds great,” Darcy said. The waiter winked at her and took off to the kitchen.

Bucky raised an eyebrow at her. “From Russia?”

“Well, it's _sort of_ true,” she replied, wrinkling her nose a little bit. “And it was the best explanation I could think of on the fly.”

He rolled his eyes, leaning over to make sure that Max was tucked completely under the table and out of anyone's way. When he sat up again, the waiter was back. “Here you go,” he said, setting down two plates with three tacos each. “You got ground beef here and shredded chicken here. You like these, I'll get you some shrimp ones - they're _really_ good - and maybe some carnitas. That's seasoned pork. My uncle's recipe.” He grinned, darting off to check on another table.

They munched their way through a taco each - Bucky declaring after the first bite that chicken tacos might be the world's most perfect food - before Darcy said, “So, what's up, Buck?”

Bucky sighed, taking a beef taco and staring at it for a minute before saying, “I just... didn't want to come out by myself.”

“Were you worried that Coulson's team might approach you again?”

He shrugged, refusing to meet her eyes. “A little bit.”

Darcy was becoming fluent in Bucky-speak, which was accomplished more by body language than actual words. His averted eyes, hunched shoulders, and jiggly leg told her a lot more than those three mumbled words. They told her that _a little bit_ , in this situation, translated to _absolutely terrified_ ,and it made her want to stab Phil Coulson in the neck with a pen. Even on his best days, Bucky was still so fragile that it took very little to knock him off-kilter; as deeply as this was affecting him, she was surprised he hadn't had a flashback.

She reached out and laid a hand on his wrist. “Are you okay?” she asked him, ducking her head a little bit to meet his eyes.

He took a deep breath. “Mostly,” he said. He stared down at the taco in his hands. “I... I had a nightmare last night.”

“Do you want to talk about it?”

He swallowed hard. “Not really, but I'm supposed to.” He took a deep breath. “It was about D.C.,” he managed, his voice small and thin. “And looking at Steve and he knew me, but I didn't know him. But in my dream, I shot him, and he died.”

It was hard to hear, because Darcy knew that Bucky would sooner cut off his own hands than harm Steve - or her, for that matter. She pressed her lips together tightly, giving his wrist a gentle squeeze. “You're safe now, Bucky,” she told him, her voice low but firm. “You're safe with me, and I won't let anybody hurt you.” She paused, waiting for him to look up at her. “And I won't let anybody make you do things you don't want to do, either.”

“I know,” he said softly. He turned their hands so that he was holding hers. “You promised.”

She smiled. “Yes. Yes, I did.” She gave him another gentle squeeze. “You did the right thing, coming to get me,” she said. Then she gave a soft laugh. “It's funny. When I was a kid, that was what they always taught us. If you don't feel safe in a situation, find an adult you can trust. When did I become the trustworthy adult?”

He smiled back. “When you stopped and asked a crazy homeless guy if he needed help,” he said softly.

***

They made it through two more types of tacos - the promised shrimp tacos and the carnitas - before Darcy waved a white flag; Bucky, whose system was nearly as enhanced as Steve's, managed to put away a plate of chorizo asado and some flautas before he declared himself full. The young waiter clapped him on the shoulder when he took away the final plate and said, “Next time you come, you ask for me. I'll hook you up with some of the stuff the white folks won't eat. Okay?”

“Definitely,” Bucky replied, grinning.

From the taquería, it was a short walk to the facility where Max got his training. The group that did the training was a non-profit partnered with the ASPCA, and their facility was located in two floors of a renovated office building in the East Village. Darcy, Bucky, and Max received a friendly greeting when they entered the building; the trainer that Bucky and Max worked with was just coming out of one of the front offices. “You're right on time,” he said. “Bucky, you and Max want to head on upstairs to the training room?”

“Sure, Eric,” Bucky said. “C'mon, Max.”

“I'll be right behind you,” Darcy said. “Gotta hit the little girls' room.”

Bucky gave a half-wave and headed up the stairs. Darcy waited until he was gone before walking around the empty front counter to the director's office. She tapped on the door facing and leaned in. “Hi, Shelly.”

“Darcy! Hi!” Shelly Weston, a tall, willowy Black woman with dreadlocks down to her knees, stood and came around her desk to shake Darcy's hand. “I cannot tell you how much we appreciate the donation.”

Darcy smiled. “Steve and I are just glad we're able to help. After everything you guys have done for Bucky...” She trailed off and shook her head. “Like I said, we're just glad we can give back. And anyway, it was mostly Stark.”

“Still,” Shelly said. “You have no idea how much we needed it.”

“We know you'll put it to good use.” Darcy shook Shelly's hand again, and then proceeded up the stairs to watch Bucky and Max have their training session.

The donation in question was a very sizable chunk of money; Darcy wasn't surprised that Shelly seemed to be reeling over it. But after seeing the difference Max had made for Bucky, it was money well donated, in both her and Steve's opinion. Just a week after Max had gotten his in-training vest, there had been an incident in a coffee shop when a particularly obnoxious customer had gotten nasty with one of the baristas. Something about the confrontation had triggered Bucky into a panic attack and he'd crouched down in a corner, whimpering. Max, cool as a cucumber, had climbed into his lap and simply sat there, nosing at Bucky's face and neck until Bucky was able to calm down again. After that incident, Darcy and Steve had both decided that they would do absolutely everything they could do to help the little non-profit stay afloat.

They'd started by deciding to make a donation themselves, and Darcy had stopped by Pepper's office one afternoon to ask her about the best way to go about such a thing, for tax purposes. The next thing she knew, both Tony and the Maria Stark Foundation were involved, and the donation in question had ballooned to a point that the little non-profit would be comfortably training and matching dogs to people in need for many, many years to come.

Darcy felt really good about that, and she wasn't embarrassed to admit it. It felt good to do good work, and to know that actions she took would have lasting positive repercussions on other people's lives.

When they walked out the door a few hours later, Antoine Triplett was sitting on a bench nearby. Darcy stepped between him and Bucky, her eyes narrowing and her fists clenching, but Trip held up both his hands, palm out. “I come in peace, man,” he said. “I'm by myself and I'm off the clock.”

“What do you want?” Darcy demanded.

Trip reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a small, thick photograph album. “I went by my mom's place this morning and got this,” he said, holding it out. “I thought Bucky'd like to have it. And Steve, too, maybe.”

Darcy approached him cautiously and accepted the album. “Thanks,” she said, tucking it into her bag. “We'll get it back to you.”

“No need,” Trip replied. “That's an extra. We had 'em from the last reunion.”

“Reunion?” Bucky asked.

Trip grinned. “Yeah, man. We have big reunions every few years.”

“We, who?” Bucky asked, poking into Darcy's bag and pulling the photo album out to peek into it.

“All the families,” Trip replied, his voice careful. “Derniers, Falsworths, Moritas, Joneses, Dugans, Carters, and Starks. Well, my mom says the Starks haven't been to one since Tony was a little kid; he probably doesn't remember them. But Howard and Maria used to come.”

Bucky blinked down at a photograph of himself and Morita standing on top of a captured HYDRA tank. “This was in Poland,” he said. “I remember this. Jim and Gabe got totally blitzed sitting on top of that tank and Gabe fell off and damn near broke his neck.”

Trip nodded. “Yep. Uncle Jim told me about how you had to climb up there and help him get down, and he ended up puking all over Falsworth.”

Bucky laughed. “Falsworth was some kind of pissed, too. He'd just gotten a new wool coat; somebody back home sent it to him.”

“Yeah, his kids still like to tell that story.” Trip paused, his eyes flicking back and forth between Bucky and Darcy. “Next one's this coming summer. You should think about it. I know everybody would love it if you came.”

“Yeah, maybe,” Bucky said, shifting nervously. “I don't do so good with crowds.”

“I get that,” Trip replied. “Just, you know, think about it.” He glanced at Darcy. “You and Steve, too. It's a good time.”

Darcy's brow furrowed. “What kind of gathering are we talking about?” she asked.

Trip grinned. “It's a family reunion,” he explained. “We rent out a campground. There's cabins, and some people show up in RVs and some people show up with tents. We always get someplace with a lake so there's fishing and swimming and stuff. Last time, we had a big chili cook-off. Which my brother won, by the way, because that dude knows how to make chili.”

“Huh.” Darcy studied him for a moment, then reached into her purse, pulled out a business card, and offered it to Trip. “Email me the details and I'll talk to Steve about it.”

“Sure.” He took the card, slipping it into his pocket. Then he stood, shifting his shoulders to settle his jacket. “Hey, listen, if you wanna try something small scale, you know, before the big event? My mom, she lives over in Hackensack. I know she'd love to see you.”

“Yeah, maybe,” Bucky said again. He was looking at the ground now, his hair falling around his face.

Darcy recognized a sign of imminent shutdown and reached for his arm. “Come on, Buck,” she said softly. “We need to be getting back.”

“Okay.” He handed her the photo album and jammed his hands into his pockets.

She tucked the album into her purse and glanced back up at Trip. “Send me that email,” she said again. “We'll let you know.”

Trip nodded, and he stayed where he was as they walked away.

***

A cab ride to the Tower was easier than dealing if Bucky shut down completely while walking, so Darcy flagged one down and cajoled him inside, keeping her voice warm and even. Max went in easily, hopping up onto the seat between Bucky and Darcy and then pushing himself halfway into Bucky's lap, whining softly as he nosed at the man's face.

Bucky sat very still for a long few minutes before his right hand slowly came up to stroke at Max's head and neck, but the tension began to ease out of him once he did. Darcy breathed a low sigh of relief at the sight. When the cab stopped in front of the Tower, she paid the driver and climbed out, holding the door open for Bucky and Max and then for a group of young women who darted over to catch the taxi. She took Bucky's arm again as they crossed the street, and waited to speak until they were alone in the private elevator.

“You okay?” she asked, looking up at him with concern.

He shrugged. “It's kind of weird,” he admitted. “It's like the world happened but I didn't. And they... they all had their lives. Hell, I think Trip might be older than _me_ , and I served with his fuckin' grandpa!” He glared at the elevator doors for a long moment before taking a deep, shuddering breath. “It's... it's not _fair_ ,” he finally managed.

Darcy blinked, taken aback by that sudden declaration, and only managed to get her arms around him before he was suddenly crashing into her, burying his forehead against her neck and taking them both to their knees. “It's not _fair_ ,” he said again, his voice muffled this time by her shirt and thick with the tears that were suddenly falling from his eyes. “It's not _fair_. They got their _lives_ , Darce. The war was over and they went _home_ and they got their lives and wives and kids and grandkids and what the fuck did I get except this fuckin' metal arm and goddamn HYDRA runnin' a hundred thousand volts through my brain whenever they fuckin' felt like it?” His hands fisted in the back of her jacket and she held him tight, closing her eyes to fight back her own tears. “It ain't fuckin' fair! What right did they have to treat me like they did? What right did they have to go inside my head and take everything away? Who gave them the fuckin' authority to _ruin me_ like that?”

There were no answers for his questions; all she could do was hold him and run her fingers through his hair and murmur soothing nonsense to provide a counterpoint when he finally devolved to brokenly sobbing “it's not  _ fair _ , it's not  _ fair _ ” over and over. 

When the elevator reached the eighty-seventh floor, the door slid open without its usual bell; Darcy looked up and realized that Sam and Clint were both standing there, concerned and ready to help. Sam pointed at the ceiling, indicating that JARVIS had contacted him about Bucky's breakdown. Darcy nodded, stroking Bucky's hair back and cupping the side of his face like a child. “Bucky, sweetheart.” she said softly, “we need to get out of the elevator.”

He hiccuped softly, but his grip on her eased just a little bit. Clint cleared his throat. “Hey, man,” he said, his voice gentle. “You need a hand up?”

Bucky was very still for a moment before finally letting his hands unclench, releasing Darcy's jacket. “Yeah,” he said softly, reaching up with his metal hand.

Unconcerned, Clint reached out and grabbed Bucky's hand and arm, helping him lever himself into an upright position. Sam took Darcy's hand and helped her up as well, and they stepped out into the common area, a concerned and whining Max following along. Clint walked Bucky over to the couch and sat him down, then sat down right next to him. Max stood on the floor and put his front paws up in Bucky's lap, and Bucky petted the dog, leaning down to rest his forehead against Max's skull. Darcy went into the kitchen to put the kettle on, and Sam sat down on the coffee table, watching Bucky. 

After a few minutes of quiet, Sam spoke. “Wanna talk about it?”

Bucky shrugged, scratching behind Max's ear. He focused on his dog for a long minute, visibly struggling, before finally managing a soft “Okay.”

Sam waited a beat, then said, “You need a minute? Gather your thoughts?” When Bucky nodded, Sam said, “Okay. Well, Darcy's making tea, so we'll wait for that.”

Clint reached out and clapped a hand on Bucky's shoulder. “You need me to stay or go?” 

Bucky glanced up at him out of the corner of his eye, then shrugged. Clint said, “How about this? If you  _ don't _ need me to stay, I'm gonna go. But if you  _ do _ need me to stay, just gimme the high sign, and I'll stay.”

Bucky thought about it for a minute, then shook his head. Clint stood, reaching down to give Max a pat. “Okay,” he said. “If you need me, have JARVIS give me a call.”

“We will,” Sam said. Clint slipped out of the room quietly just as the kettle whistled.

A minute or so later, Darcy came in with an actual tea tray, kettle and cups and a little plate of cookies and sugar and lemon and everything else all set out for them. She placed it on the coffee table and crouched down beside Bucky, resting a hand on his knee. “I'm going to say the same thing Clint did,” she said. “If you don't need me to stay, I'm going to let you talk with Sam in private. But if you do need me to stay, I will.”

Bucky considered this again for a long minute. Then he spoke. “I... I think I can do it.”

“Okay.” She reached up and patted his cheek. “I'll be down on sixty-five if you need me; just have JARVIS call.”

Bucky nodded, leaning into her touch for just a moment. She gave him a gentle smile, then stood and left the room. Bucky focused on Max for a long moment before Sam spoke. “Tell me what it is that's not fair,” he said gently.

Bucky swallowed hard. “They got kids,” he said finally, his voice rough. “The boys. Morita and Dum Dum and... and everybody. After the war, they got wives and kids.  _ Lives _ , you know? All I got was this shit.” He gestured eloquently with his left hand.

Sam took a sip of his tea and nodded. “You're right,” he said after a moment. “It's not fair.” Bucky's head jerked up at that, his eyes meeting Sam's, and Sam laughed softly. “What, you thought I was gonna say something different?”

Bucky shrugged. “Pa always used to say life ain't fair.”

“And your Pa was right,” Sam said. “But shit, Bucky, just because a thing's true don't mean we don't sometimes want to talk about how it is. It ain't fair that there's people living homeless on the street; it ain't fair that there's people in refugee camps in Syria. It ain't fair that there's black folks can't get ahead just because they're black. And it ain't fair what HYDRA did to you. It ain't fair and it ain't right. And if I had that fucker Zola right here in front of me, I'd punch his weaselly fuckin' face in.”

Bucky smiled slightly. “Sound like me.”

“Yeah, well, maybe there's a reason for that.” Sam leaned forward, his elbows on his knees. “When I was growin' up, I read comic books. There weren't a lot of Black superheroes, but the ones there were, man, I read 'em all. Steel was one of my favorites. And it's funny, the parallels. Steel was inspired by Superman, so he built himself a suit of armor that made him strong and bulletproof.”

Bucky studied him for a minute. “You mean like Steve and Tony.”

Sam nodded. “Don't ever tell that to Tony, though. Man's got daddy issues you can see from space.”

Bucky gave a soft, rusty laugh. “Yeah,” he said. “Noticed that.”

Sam grinned. “Well, I read Steel a lot. I read Mr. Terrific. I read Black Lightning, man, that dude was  _ awesome _ .” He paused. “But like I say, it wasn't a lot of Black superheroes out there, so if you wanted to read more than just a few comics, and especially if you wanted to read anything that was popular, you had to read about white superheroes, too. So I read Superman and Batman and Green Arrow and a few others. And I read the Kid Commandos.”

Bucky raised an eyebrow. “ _ Kid _ Commandos?”

Sam grinned. “Oh yeah. And it's exactly what you think. First they turned you into a potty-mouthed kid sidekick, then they put you in charge of a tiny little squad of badass super-powered teenagers.”

Bucky groaned. “That is just not okay.”

Sam laughed. “Well, that's what they did. And can I just tell you, man, I read that thing  _ religiously _ . So yeah, if I sound like you... well, the earliest writers  _ did _ get character advice from people who actually knew you, so...” He shrugged.

Bucky shook his head. “And none a' those assholes told 'em I was a grown man?”

Sam waved a hand. “Artistic license,” he said, grinning. He handed Bucky one of the cookies off the plate. “My point is... just because life ain't fair, just because somebody else has it rough, that don't mean you have to sit around and stew on whatever's the matter with you. Life ain't fair, but sometimes it helps to talk about it. That's my whole  _ job _ , man.”

“Pretty sure you didn't sign on to head-shrink the crazy ex-assassin,” Bucky said, shaking his head.

“Actually,” Sam replied, “I kinda did.” He grinned at Bucky's startled expression. “I volunteered for this, Bucky. I told Steve I was with him no matter what, and I'd do what it took to help him get you back. But you gotta remember, man - I met you. I fought with you. I knew what you were like when I signed on, and I knew what we'd probably be up against. So if you wanna get particular about it, I didn't sign up for  _ you _ \- I signed up for that guy you were before Professor Xavier super-glued your head back together.”

Bucky studied Sam for a minute. “Glutton for punishment?” he finally asked.

Sam laughed. “Nah, man. Just tryin' to do the most good wherever I can do it, you know?”

“Yeah,” Bucky said, looking down at Max again. “I know.”

***

“I think we should bring Coulson in.”

“Are you nuts?”

“Jury's out.” Tony Stark leaned back in a chair in the single private conference room on sixty-five, his face calm as he faced Steve Rogers. “But then, we've had this conversation before.”

“Once or twice,” Steve replied. He opened his mouth to say something else, and was interrupted.

“Captain,” Darcy said, speaking firmly, “hear him out, please.”

Steve raised an eyebrow at her. She never addressed him by his title. But there was a look on her face that told him this was serious, so he sighed, grabbing the nearest chair and dropping into it. “Fine,” he said. “This is me, listening.”

“Funny, it looks a lot like you sulking.”

“Iron Man,” Darcy snapped. “Less provocation, more explanation. I know Fury liked it when you guys were at each others' throats, but I don't have anything to hide, and I have to live with you two assholes.”

Steve considered her words, staring at Tony across the table. It was true, he suddenly realized. Fury  _ had _ liked it when they were at each other's throats; in fact, had gone to some lengths to set them at odds whenever he could. Perhaps he had realized that the Avengers, while valuable as a team, could be a threat to his own authority if they got  _ too _ close to one another. He knew that Fury had turned things around at the end; he hadn't been HYDRA, and he was - or at least he claimed to be - working against them in the shadows of Europe. But Fury was fond of things like expedience and minimum acceptable casualty risks; Fury had known - it was impossible  _ not _ to know - the dangers of Project Insight being misused, and had gone ahead with it anyway. In Steve's admittedly rather black-and-white moral scale, Fury was most decidedly a dark grey. But Tony was not his enemy, and Darcy wasn't Fury.

He stood up and moved, walking around the table. He grabbed the seat next to Tony's, pulled it out, and sat down in it, turning to face his teammate and sometime friend. “All right, Tony,” he said. “Tell me why you think we should bring Coulson in. I'm listening.”

Tony blinked. He glanced over at Darcy, as though suspecting some kind of trick. Then he looked back at Steve, took a breath, and began to speak.

Darcy, sitting on the credenza, smiled.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just to give credit where credit is due, I'd like to thank Tygermama for posting her headcanon about the Howling Commandos Family Reunions on tumblr. I fully intend to revisit the idea a little later on, hopefully in a lot more detail. :)


	5. Chapter 5

“Coulson,” Tony said, “is a company man. He has always been a company man, and he will always be a company man. That's all he knows.” He tapped on the table's glass top, and one of the wall screens came alive with Coulson's SHIELD service record. “Fury recruited him directly out of high school, and molded and shaped him into the man he is today. Phil Coulson is the absolute embodiment of what Nick Fury thought a SHIELD agent ought to be. That's why Fury handed him the reins when he took off for God knows where after you decided to drop a house on the Triskellion.”

“Okay,” Steve said, sitting back in his chair. He examined the information on the wall, which was replicated on the tablet that Darcy brought him. “I can see what you mean,” he said finally. “With a few exceptions, he's practically a junior version of Fury.”

“Those exceptions are what I think we can work with,” Tony said. “He's got a little bit more of a moral compass, for one thing.”

“If he was willing to work with us, though, then why approach Bucky the way he did?” Steve asked. “If he'd heard rumors that the Winter Soldier was working with the Avengers, why not come directly to us? It's not as if he didn't know where we were or how to contact us.”

“Partly habit,” Tony said. “Despite the slightly less grey moral compass, he's still a little bit Fury-shaped, which means that he's got the ingrained habits of a spy. But I think there may be something to what you said about him having a fanboy moment. If he heard that the real Bucky Barnes was alive and well in New York City? Yeah, the man with the entire mint condition collection of Captain America trading cards would definitely want to be the first guy to get his hands on that little collectible.”

Steve shuddered a little bit. “It's just so awkward,” he said in reply to the amused expression on Tony's face.

“And that brings us to the other thing.” He ran a hand down his face. “Both a reason why he might work with us and a reason why he might not have wanted to approach us. Clint.”

Steve let out a low whistle. “Clint,” he said softly. He ran a hand through his hair. “He wasn't very forthcoming, was he?”

“Not really, no,” Tony replied. In fact, during the team meeting that had followed Coulson's departure, Clint had spoken very little; when he had spoken, it was to agree with everyone else that Coulson should under no circumstances be given unsupervised access to Bucky, and to state that he would go along with what the others wished to do about any other matters concerning Coulson's team. On the subject of Coulson himself, Clint had been utterly silent.

“We need to talk to him about this,” Steve finally said. “We can't proceed until we know how he feels about it.”

Tony glanced over at Darcy. “Do we know where the man stands?”

“Let's ask him,” Darcy said. “JARVIS, please locate Agent Barton.”

“Agent Barton is in the library,” JARVIS replied.

“Could you please ask him to join us here?”

“Certainly, Miss Lewis. One moment.” There was a pause, then JARVIS said, “He is on his way.”

“Thanks, JARVIS.” Darcy picked up the desk telephone and pressed a button. “Alex, could you bring coffee in, please? Full service. And that big yellow Tupperware that's in the little fridge in my office. Thanks.”

A few moments later, there was a tap on the door. Darcy walked over and opened it, finding both Alex and Clint on the other side. She stepped back and Alex entered, pushing the coffee machine on its cart. Clint followed him in, pausing in consternation when he saw Steve and Tony already there. His eyes cut from them to Darcy. “Why does this feel like an ambush?”

“Because we've been talking about you behind your back, Hawkeye,” Darcy replied. “Thank you, Alex,” she said to the young Latino man. He nodded, stepping out again and pulling the door shut.

“Who wants coffee, before we get started?”

“I just want to know what the fuck's going on,” Clint demanded. “Am I being benched or something?”

“Is there a reason you should be benched?” Steve asked.

“No!” 

“Then why would we bench you?” Darcy asked reasonably. “Now, if you'd like to get your panties out of that twist, we can all have some coffee and we'll bring you up to speed on what we've been talking about.”

Clint's eyes were still narrow with suspicion. “What's this  _ about _ ?”

“It's about Coulson,” Tony said. “Of course.”

“What about him?”

“Jesus Christ, Clint!” Darcy snapped. “What  _ is _ it with you people walking into a meeting room and automatically becoming belligerent assholes? Look at me.”

He obeyed, turning to face her. She pointed at her own face. “Who am I?”

“You're Darcy,” he said, wary, as though he thought she might be going a little bit crazy.

“Right. Where did we meet, you and me?”

“New Mexico,” Clint said promptly. “When Thor came.”

“And what did we do in New Mexico, Clint, the night after Coulson brought back Jane's equipment?”

He paused, and his lips twitched up into a grin. “We got completely wasted and sat on the roof of the car dealership singing  _ John Deere Green _ at three in the morning.”

Tony crowed. “Tell me there's video footage.”

“There's no video footage,” Darcy replied. “Clint Barton, when did I become your enemy?”

He blinked at her. “You... You're not, Darce,” he stammered.

“Exactly. I'm not your enemy; I'm your freakin' team member. And your friend. So are Steve and Tony. Now will you please, for one hot second,  _ please _ sit down with some of your team members and have a civil goddamn discussion about an important topic without assuming that we're out to get you just because we're in a fucking conference room?”

Clint blinked at her. “Okay,” he said, pulling out the nearest chair and sitting down.

“Thank you.  _ Now _ . Would anyone like some fucking coffee?” One hand came up, a finger pointing dangerously in Tony's direction. “ _ Don't you dare _ .”

“I wouldn't dream of it,” he replied, grinning broadly. “I would  _ love _ some coffee.”

Darcy pushed the Tupperware across the table at Clint. “Share those, jackass.”

“You know, in my defense, you started out by officialing at me.”

She raised an eyebrow. “I what?”

“You called me Hawkeye.” He shrugged, still a little sullen. “It never ends well when people call me into meetings that have been going on for awhile and start out by calling me Hawkeye.”

Darcy rolled her eyes. “Well, considering that it's your code name, and that's what we're gonna be calling you when we're dealing in official team business, you  _ might _ want to get over that particular hang-up.”

“Maybe we should discuss corporate structure for just a second,” Tony said, scratching at his beard. “And don't make that face at me; I wouldn't actually bring it up right now if I didn't think it was important.”

“What, then?” Clint said, leaning back in his chair as Darcy passed out cups of coffee.

Steve pointed at the Tupperware. “Are you gonna share those, or not?”

Clint sat back up and opened the Tupperware, revealing that it was full of apple kolaches. “No,” Clint said. “I don't think I am.”

Darcy whacked him on the back of the head, then tossed a few small paper plates onto the table. “Share,” she said. “Tony, say what you're gonna say so we can move on.”

Tony poked at the table as Clint passed out plates of kolaches, and Coulson's service record disappeared from the wall monitor, replaced by a flow chart. “Okay. So, this is the org chart for our new division - and I am still lobbying to call it SWORD, by the way. The important line to look at is the really long one that's the third one down.”

Clint squinted at it. “That's us,” he said. He blinked, leaning forward to read the list of names. “All of us. Including Sam and Bucky.”

“That's right,” Tony said. “Barnes doesn't know it yet, but once he gets back on an even keel, we want him right in there with us.”

“If he wants in,” Steve added.

“Right. Because Spangles seems to think he might not. Anyway.” Tony waved a dismissive hand, as though the very idea was ridiculous. “The important thing to notice is that none of us are above any of the others. Tactically, of course, when we're in the field, Cap still calls the shots, because he's the one with the experience and training to do it. But when it comes to making decisions, we  _ are _ the Board of Directors. All of us.”

“How come Darcy's above us?”

“Three reasons,” Tony replied. "First of all, she's in charge of the day-to-day in the office. Herding the analysts, making the money calls, that's her job. Second, because she's the funnel. We make decisions, they come to her, and she's the one who puts them into action. She deals directly with Pepper and the Stark Industries Board of Directors as needed. She's the one the media comes to for statements. She's the public non-masked face of the Avengers.”

Clint nodded. “And the third reason?”

“Because did you see how quickly she made the three of us behave?” Steve said. “I haven't been put in my place that quickly since the last time one of the nuns got in my face at the orphanage.”

“You're damn right,” Darcy replied. “If anybody can make this bucket full of sugared-up kindergarteners act like they're civilized, it's me.”

“We're not kindergarteners, Darcy,” Steve said in a slightly repressive tone.

“No?” Darcy asked, dropping into a chair and sitting back with an innocent expression on her face. “Did we not just have a deep and meaningful conversation about the nature of friendship, followed by snack time - which included a lesson on sharing - and Tony doing show-and-tell?”

Steve opened his mouth to rebut her, but Tony said, “She's got a point,” and Steve closed his mouth again.

Clint sat forward, munching on a kolache. “Okay, so we've established that you guys aren't my bosses, and I'm not fired, and you said you wanted to talk about... about Coulson. So talk.”

“Tony thinks that Coulson could be a useful asset to the organization as a whole, and to our team in particular, if we brought him in to work for us,” Steve said. “And I admit, after hearing his reasoning, I kind of agree with him. But Coulson betrayed us, and he especially hurt  _ you _ , and if having him around is something that's going to make your life difficult, we can absolutely do without him. So... we need to talk, but we need you to talk to us also.” He paused. “The reason why we're in this conference room is because it's one of the few places where we can do official Avengers' business  _ and _ be completely dark at the same time. So anything you say in this room absolutely goes no farther.”

Clint looked down at his hands. “I can't give you an answer,” he said after a long moment of silence. “I don't know.”

“You don't know how you feel about working with him?”

“I don't know how I feel about  _ him _ ,” Clint clarified. He sat back in his chair, rubbing at his forehead. “Before we saw that tape, you know, I'd have given anything.  _ Anything _ . Just for him to be alive and okay. I would have traded places with him in a heartbeat. Let Loki kill me and let Phil live? Where do I sign?” He shook his head. “And then I saw that tape and I realized... this whole time. He  _ was _ alive. He was  _ fine _ . He... I don't...” He shook his head. “Part of me wants to know - was the injury even real? The only person's word we have for it is Fury's. The blood in the containment unit? He could've faked that. Easily. He could've used a life model decoy. There's a thousand ways this could've gone down, and about nine hundred of them involve Phil sitting in an office somewhere, perfectly fine, while Fury tells you guys he's dead to convince you to work together.”

Clint paused, took a sip of his coffee. He stared down into the cup. “So I don't know how I feel. Part of me... part of me wants to just say 'fuck it,' and let him back into my life. Like, it doesn't matter the capacity. If he wants to be friends, if he wants to be co-workers, if he wants to pick up right where we left off, just... just to have him in my life again would be...” He shook his head, then looked up at Steve and Tony, letting them see the brokenness inside of him. “But there's another part of me that wants to make him pay. Make him hurt the way I hurt, make him really feel it deep down inside of himself the way I did.” He swallowed. “The way I  _ do _ . Every damn day.”

Steve and Darcy exchanged glances across the table in the moment of silence that followed. Then Clint spoke again. “So... the answer to your question is: I don't know. I don't know how I feel about him - about  _ them -  _ coming to work with us. All I know is that when he said my name in the living room yesterday, the reason why I ran out of there like that was because if he'd said it again, I was going to throw up.”

Darcy reached out and laid her hand on Clint's arm. “If you don't want him here, we don't have to have him,” she said gently. “If we need him, we can treat him as a consultant. Let him go off and do his own thing and we can call him in as needed. You never have to see him or speak to him again.”

Clint took a deep breath. “No,” he said. “I might be a lot of things, but I'm not a coward. I can face him if I have to.”

“It's not about you facing him,” Tony said. “It's about you being able to function with him in the room, or in your ear if necessary. If anybody's going to face anybody,  _ he _ needs to face  _ you _ and own up to what he did.”

Clint considered this. “All right,” he said after a moment. “I think... I think I can deal. Maybe. Probably. Maybe.” He took a deep breath. “But not in my ear. If I need somebody in my ear, I want it to be either Darcy or JARVIS.”

“We can work with that,” Darcy said.

“What's the rest of the team had to say about this?” Clint asked.

Steve shook his head. “We haven't talked about it with them yet. You were the one who's been most impacted by the whole situation, so we wanted to talk to you about it first. If you couldn't deal, for whatever reason, there wouldn't be any reason to bring it to the others.”

Clint nodded. “Thanks,” he said softly.

***

JARVIS sent out a quiet alert: Avengers should assemble on the sixty-fifth floor for an operational meeting at four-thirty, if they were available. If anyone was unavailable, the meeting would be rescheduled for the next day. Dinner would be provided. Significant others (to wit: Jane and Pepper, who was in from Malibu), and also Bucky were of course invited as well. Responses requested as soon as possible.

Responses came back in the affirmative from everyone, and Darcy put in an order for delivery Italian. Then she took Clint on his first official tour of the floor. Tony and Steve had of course seen it before, many times, but this was Clint's first experience with the space. She took him from the western end, where they'd been closed up in the conference room, across to the eastern end where the offices were. Then she showed him the wide-open center of the room. “This is where the important work gets done,” she said.

“There's like... five desks,” Clint noted.

“Fifteen,” Darcy corrected. “And everybody gets a cubicle, too, over there.” She pointed to the south side of the building, where a small but attractively decorated cubicle farm existed quietly, a few heads visible over the dividers. “But Pepper's got a designer on retainer whose entire job is to design effective workspaces and things, and he says that this is one of the most efficient kinds of spaces that exists. You have small spaces so each individual has their own space, in the cubicle farm, right? But then you have this big space where people can collaborate and share information - which is what we want the analysts doing. So that way everyone knows what everyone else knows, and we try to avoid situations where there's an asset in the field, like, say, an Avenger, and the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing and it puts the asset at risk.”

“What about when stuff goes down that you don't want to talk about in public?” Clint asked. “Is that what the conference room is for?”

Darcy nodded. “That, or there's also some smaller collaborative spaces on the other side of the cubicle farm, for when maybe four or five people need to get together and hash things out.” She paused, grinning. “Or when an asset and his handler need to have a loud argument without people staring and listening in.”

“Oh, so you were thinking of me when you designed the place,” Clint replied, grinning back.

Steve laughed. “We were actually thinking of the future. Everything's so small right now that we honestly don't need this much space - but in five years, if all goes as planned, we may need this space and the floor above or below.”

“Or both,” Tony interjected. “Which is why they're both currently vacant.”

Clint nodded. “I like it,” he said, looking around. “A lot.” He paused as Maria Hill came into view, passing from the cubicle farm across the open space toward the restrooms, chatting with one of the new analysts. “I assume Hill's in charge again?”

“You assume incorrectly,” Tony replied.

Darcy hummed softly. “Let's step into my office.” They did so, and once the door was shut, she leaned against her desk and faced Clint. “There's something about the way this is all set up that's important for everyone on the team to understand. I know that when you were with SHIELD you were just another agent, just another guy who took orders and did as you were told and all of that. But that's not how it's going to work here.”

Clint leaned his shoulder against the wall. “Okay.”

“How it works here,” Steve said, taking up the thread of conversation, “is like... well, like a corporation. You have a CEO, and you have a board of directors, and you have that organizational chart like the one we saw earlier.”

Clint's eyes flicked back and forth between the three of them. “So... when Tony said earlier about us being the board...?”

“I meant it,” Tony said. “ _ We _ are the people in charge of this division. So no, Maria Hill won't be giving you orders. She'll be  _ taking _ them. From us - all of us.”

“That's not to say that we won't listen to suggestions from the people who know what they're doing,” Darcy interjected. “Maria was Fury's second in command, and she knows a lot about intel gathering and doing what it is that we want to do. But she understands that we're doing it  _ our _ way, not Fury's way, and that when it comes to running missions and doing the things we do, Avengers don't just blindly take orders the way SHIELD agents used to do. Those days are over.”

Clint nodded, his gaze going out across the collaborative workspace. He recognized two of the young analysts sitting together near a potted plant, a young Middle Eastern woman and a Black man who had been recent additions to SHIELD's analyst pool just before the whole debacle. Standing behind them was a skinny white guy with spots who looked like he ought to still be in high school. He was leaning over the woman's shoulder, pointing at something on the screen of her laptop. “I like the sound of this,” Clint said softly.

Darcy smiled. “I thought you might.”

***

Over dinner that evening, the rest of the team got the same introductory explanation of how the new division would work. Once everyone was fully briefed and felt comfortable with their understanding of the new command structure, Darcy turned the floor over to Tony.

He stood up, pacing the long side of the conference room. “So, I've been giving this a lot of thought,” he said, “and I think we need to bring in Coulson and his team.”

At the end of the table, Bucky tensed; Steve put a warm hand on his right shoulder and gave it a gentle squeeze. Unaware, Tony continued. “I know that he's a touchy subject for all of us, but hear me out. I think we could benefit from having his knowledge available to us, and I have a concern that if we continue to operate independently of one another, we'll eventually end up in conflict, whether through miscommunication or an argument about jurisdiction or whatever.” He waved a hand. “So I think that it would be beneficial to both us and to them if we brought them in.”

“When you say 'bring them in,'” Pepper said, “do you mean as consultants, or...?”

Tony chuffed out a laugh with little humor in it. “That would be apropos, wouldn't it?” he said. “But no; I'm not  _ quite _ that petty. Not today, anyway. I was actually thinking about bringing them in to work for us. Officially.”

Natasha was watching Clint across the table, her eyes narrow. “Clint,” she said softly.

He shook his head. “I'm fine,” he said. “We talked about it already.”

Thor frowned. “The son of Coul would be a useful... asset,” he began carefully, “but I am concerned. This act of betrayal was perpetrated by Nicholas Fury, but the son of Coul was complicit in it, and in doing so, he needlessly inflicted much grief upon Clint. How do we know that we can trust him not to be complicit in further betrayals? I do not with to malign the honor of an honorable man, but these have not been the actions of an honorable man.”

“That's the trouble, right there,” Steve said, running a hand through his hair. “He didn't  _ do  _ the thing, but he didn't  _ undo  _ it, either, and he should have.”

“I have some concerns as well,” Natasha commented. “For one thing, we know that he _says_ he's on his own, but how do we know that this is accurate? Knowing Phil Coulson, he has his own agenda buried deep somewhere. Perhaps he's still working for Fury, but keeping it secret.”

“Or maybe he's playing some deeper game,” Tony murmured.

Clint's head jerked up. “What's that supposed to mean?”

“Well, how do we know, really, who he's working for? To be perfectly honest, how do we know who anyone is really working for?” Tony sat back in his chair, sighing heavily. “We're recruiting people out of a tainted pool. We know Hill is clean because of D.C., but Coulson wasn't in D.C.; he was conveniently elsewhere. How do we know for sure that Coulson himself doesn't have... shall we say divided loyalties?”

“There is no way Phil Coulson is HYDRA,” Clint said. “I would stake my life on that.”

“Up until recently, you'd have staked your life on him being dead, too,” Bucky said softly. Clint rounded on him, rage on his face, and Bucky held up his hands in a gesture of peace. “I'm not trying to be hurtful,” he said gently. “Just pointin' out that it wouldn't be the first time he lied to you.”

Clint sat there for a moment, anger still red on his face. Finally, he shook his head. “No,” he said. “No, I'll accept that he lied to me, I'll accept that he didn't want to be with me any more. I'll accept that he pretended he was dead for almost two years. But Phil being HYDRA? No. There's no way.”

The subject was conspicuously dropped after that. They talked logistics - Coulson and his team could be housed in the tower complex if they wanted to be, but would not have access to the Avengers' private floors, and they would all be thoroughly vetted before being allowed to join the new agency.

Sam floated the idea of asking Professor Xavier whether he had any psychics who might be available to come and work as a sort of lie detector. “Somebody that can get inside their heads and see where their loyalties really lie. That would be a hell of a useful ability to have on our side.”

“I'll call,” Bruce said. “See if he has anyone who'd be willing to come.”

“All right,” Pepper said firmly into the momentary lull that followed. “That's enough shop talk. Dinner's getting cold.”

“And that, ladies and gents, is an order direct from your CEO,” Tony announced. “I recommend we follow it.”

“Seconded,” Steve agreed, reaching for his fork.


	6. Chapter 6

“I thought I might find you here.”

Phil Coulson looked up at the sound of a familiar voice. He tried to smile, but the expression came out weak and he gave it up after a moment. “I'm glad you came,” he said simply.

“Yeah, well, I'm not sure how long I'm staying, so don't get excited.”

“I can understand that.” Phil rested his hands on his knees, settling back against the park bench he was seated on. “Out of curiosity, why are you here?”

“Because I have to make a decision, and I can't make it without all the intel. You have the intel I need. I'm here to get it.”

“Just intel?”

The immediate response was sharp, cutting. “Do you deserve anything else?”

“No.”

“I didn't think so.”

There was a long silence before Clint Barton spoke again from his position perched on a pile of boulders above Phil's head. “So talk,” he said simply.

Phil took a deep breath, fumbling for the place to begin. Finally he said, “Will you sit with me? You're making me nervous, looming over me like that.”

“No,” Clint snapped. “I won't sit with you. I don't want to sit with you. I don't want to touch you, I don't want to smell you, I don't even want to look at you. So you can either start talking - which, by the way, involves hearing your voice, which is another thing I don't want to be doing - or I can go.”

“Clint - ”

“No!” The negation was out of his mouth before he even realized he was going to say it, but there it was, hanging between them. “No,” he said again, softer this time. “You don't get to say my name. Not like that. Not like... like I _meant_ something to you. You don't get to ask questions, and you don't get to beg for forgiveness or absolution. You don't get that. You had plenty of time for that. All you get is one chance to give me your side of the story. If you don't want to take it, then that's your decision, but if the next thing you say is anything outside of what I want to hear, I'm gone, and I'm done with you.”

There was a long silence. Phil broke it, finally, by taking a deep breath and beginning. “I actually did die,” he said. “When Loki stabbed me. I remember it happening. I remember telling Fury that the Initiative would never work unless there was something, some catalyst to bring the team together. And then...” He trailed off for a moment, his hand coming up almost unconsciously to rub at his chest through the blue polo shirt he wore.

“They told me at first that I was only dead for a few minutes. They sent me to Tahiti to recover. I didn't know which end was up for a long time. Months, at least. But they had me convinced that you were fine. I remember asking for you, and they said you...” He swallowed hard. “They said you were recovering, yourself. From what Loki did to you. They said you needed time to get better.” He shook his head, staring bitterly off in the vague direction of D.C. “I didn't find out until later that it was all lies.”

Clint didn't speak; Phil didn't look at him. He rubbed at his chest again. “I found out later that I wasn't dead for just a few minutes. I was dead for days. I don't actually know how long. Dr. Streiten just said 'days' - that could be as few as three or as many as thirty. I honestly don't know. What I know is that Fury...”

Clint made a low, strangled noise. “Fucking Fury.”

Phil gave a soft, humorless laugh. “Fucking Fury,” he agreed. “Dr. Streiten told me that he was brought in on the seventh procedure. By that point I was being kept conscious, in order for my brain functions and cognitive abilities to be tested. They...” He trailed, off, trying to organize his thoughts. “From what I can remember, I was on a table in a... facility. It wasn't even a proper hospital or medical ward. It was...” He shook his head. “It was a black op. And I remember that in the reflection off one of the metal surfaces, I could see this machine. It was over my head, and it had these probe things - I don't know how to describe it. It was sending pulses into my brain. Not my head, you understand. My  _brain._ ”

Clint made a soft gagging sound.

Phil chuffed softly. “Exactly.” He sighed, shifting a little bit. “I remember now. I remember lying there, in pain and in fear, and begging them to let me die. But they changed my memories. They took away the memory of the torture and the fear and they replaced it all with memories of an island paradise, Mai Tais on the beach at the Guest House and a long, slow, pleasant convalescence. They planted into my head the idea that you were...” He paused, cleared his throat. “That you were fine without me, that you knew I was safe and that you didn't n-need me.”

A strangled sound echoed from the top of the rocks.

“I know. I know, now. But the only reason I know is because not long ago, I was captured by an agent of an enemy we called the Clairvoyant and subjected to...” He stopped, shook his head. “They stripped the false memories and gave me back the real ones. I knew then. I knew what they did to me, what _Fury_ did to me. I knew that they lied; that you thought I was dead, and that everything was... wrong.”

“You could have come to me,” Clint said softly.

“I couldn't,” Phil replied. “I had to find the Clairvoyant. I had to find out what he knew, what he was doing. I was - at that point - on a mission, and as much as I l-love you, as much as I wanted so badly to fix everything that was wrong, to fix _us_ , and to have you back...”

“The mission was more important.”

“It was.” There was no regret in Phil's voice then; that was something they both understood about each other from the beginning. It wasn't always true that the mission would be more important than their relationship, but it was sometimes true. Because of the very nature of what they dealt with on a day-to-day basis, sometimes the mission, the _world_ , would be more important. “And then,” Phil concluded, “I discovered a number of things in very quick succession. First, I discovered that they used a drug called GH-325 to revive me. I went searching, and I found the Guest House. It was a secret facility on an island. John Garrett helped me infiltrate it. While we were there, I found more vials of GH-325, and I discovered what it was.” He swallowed hard. “It was some kind of compound derived from the preserved body of an extraterrestrial. Not an Asgardian; something I've never seen before.”

Clint gagged again.

Phil made a soft sound of agreement. “Then I learned that my team was not my team; it was assembled by Melinda May, and I was manipulated into choosing the agents that she wanted. It was all an elaborate scheme to keep me closely watched and guarded in case something should go wrong. I mean, really, after being revived the way I was, and injected with some kind of alien substance, what could  _possibly_ go wrong?” He laughed, sardonic and bitter. “Then I learned that SHEILD had been infiltrated by HYDRA, that John Garrett  _was_ the Clairvoyant, and that he was HYDRA. And fourth...” He swallowed. “I learned that Grant Ward, who I had been manipulated into accepting and who I had trusted with my life and the life of my team, was also HYDRA.”

“I fucking _knew it,_ that _asshole_ ,” Clint ground out.

Phil nodded. “You did know. I remember that we talked about it.” He took a deep breath, leaning forward and resting his head in his hands. “So now you know why.”

Clint sat there for a long time, silent. Then he said, “I brought a team of mercenaries onto the Helicarrier. One of them freed Loki, and gave him the scepter he used to kill you.”

“You were under Loki's control at the time,” Phil replied. “It isn't as if you did it of your own free will.”

“And what you're telling me now is that up until you were captured by the Clairvoyant, until they stripped away the fake memories that Fury had implanted in your brain, _you_ were basically under Fury's control. He got into your mind and played with it like it was Silly Putty, and he made you think the way he wanted you to think and he made you do the things he wanted you to do.”

Phil was silent for a moment before he finally spoke again. “Yes,” was all he said, but the tone was revelatory.

“If... if you'd been in your own mind, in your right mind,” Clint said, “you never would have left me alone.”

“That's right,” Phil said. “And you don't have to believe me, but it's true. I would  _ never _ have left you alone. We were together for eight years, Clint. I loved you.” He paused. “I still love you.”

There was another very long silence. And then Clint spoke again. “I believe you,” he said simply. But when Phil looked up, filled with hope, at the place where he'd been crouched on the boulders, Clint was gone.

***

He'd swear until the day he died that he wasn't snooping, not really; he was just poking through a drawer out of boredom, to see what was in it. But he found the box there and he held it in his hand for a long moment, running his thumb across the smooth blue velvet. And then he popped it open and he tried not to choke at the sight. It had to be a custom job; Bucky had looked in shop windows and he knew that the jewelry designers these days weren't making rings that looked just exactly like Steve's Ma's ring that they'd had to pawn one winter to pay for medicine. He stared at it for a long moment, letting the rush of memory overwhelm him. Then he closed the box again and made a decision.

Steve came home before Darcy did, and when he arrived, Bucky was sitting on the sofa, waiting for him. “Hey, Stevie,” Bucky said. “You got a minute?”

“Sure, Buck,” Steve replied, dropping his keys in the bowl by the door. “What's up?”

Bucky waited until Steve had come and joined him on the couch before speaking again. “So, um. I got bored today and I was poking around. I dunno. Like you do.” He gave Steve an embarrassed grin. “But, um, I found something. And I wanted to know... Steve, am I in the way here?”

Steve stared at him in shock. “Of course not, Bucky! Why the hell would you think you were in the way?”

Bucky reached into his pocket and pulled out the blue velvet box. “Because this ain't on that girl's finger yet,” he said, “and you've had it for awhile.”

Steve reached out, taking the box from Bucky. He flicked it open with a thumb, letting the light flare and flicker off the central stone: a deep brownish-red garnet surrounded by smaller diamonds in a hexagonal, art-deco setting. It was absolutely gorgeous, and Darcy was going to love it. “Since D.C.,” he admitted. “She was going to move down, you know? When everything happened, she was getting ready to start putting out feelers to try and find a job on the Hill, or maybe with one of the more liberal lobbying firms. So I had it made, because I was workin' up my nerve to ask.”

“And then I happened,” Bucky said softly. “And you had to put it aside. But it's been four months and you still ain't asked, so I'm askin' you again, Steve: am I in the way here? Because I'm pretty sure there ain't nothin' to me movin' in upstairs in her apartment. Hell, she practically lives down here with us - with you, I mean - anyway.”

“You're not in the way, Bucky, Jesus.” Steve shook his head. “I just... I've been workin' up my nerve. Just because I got this fancy new body doesn't mean I'm any better with the dames than I used to be.”

Bucky's eyes narrowed at him. “That's a bullshit excuse,” he said frankly. “Do you love the girl or not?”

“Yeah, I love her,” Steve said, feeling oddly defensive.

“You wanna marry her and make a family with her or not?”

“Yeah, I do!” Steve exclaimed.

Bucky stood up, jamming his hands into his pockets. “Then do somethin' about it,” he said. “Because that's a hell of a girl you got there, and if you  _ don't _ , then I  _ will _ .” He smacked his leg for Max and turned, yanking the front door open.

Darcy was just in the process of reaching for the doorknob and she froze in surprise, then smiled up at him. “Hey, Bucky,” she said. She paused, looking at his face. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah, I'm good,” he said. “Just about to take Max out for a walk.”

“Oh, okay. You want some company?”

He shook his head. Then, feeling impish, he reached out and pulled her into a sudden hug. “Hey, Darce,” he said into her hair, “you know you're the best, right?”

She laughed, hugging him back. “Yeah, Bucky,” she said. “I know.”

He released her, grinning, and leaned down to bump his forehead affectionately against hers - a habit he'd picked up in those early days, before Xavier fixed him, when he had been so locked up in his own mind that he couldn't even speak. Then he let her go and started down the hallway. “Come on, Maxie,” he called out. “Let's go get a hot dog, what do you say?”

Darcy entered the apartment looking a little dumbfounded. She caught sight of Steve on the couch and shook her head slightly, dropping her keys into the bowl with his. “What the hell was that all about?” she asked. “Do you know?”

“Yeah, he just... we just had a talk, is all. I think he's in a good mood.”

“Sure looks like it,” Darcy said, still blinking in pleased surprise. She kicked her Converse off, wiggling her toes in the carpet, and then scooped them up, heading for the bathroom. “I think I might jump in the shower,” she said. “Care to join me?”

He started to say yes automatically, then stopped. “I do want to,” he said. “But I need to - there's something I have to go do first.” He crossed the room in a few long strides, leaning down to capture her lips in a searing kiss, and then he released her, smiling softly. “I'll be back in just a little bit, okay?”

“O-okay,” she managed, reeling slightly. He made sure she had her balance before disappearing out the door and down the hall. She stared at the front door for a moment before shaking her head. “They've both lost it,” she murmured to herself, then turned and headed into the bedroom.

***

The elevator opened directly into the living room of the penthouse; Steve was always afraid he'd walk in on something he didn't really want to see, but so far, it hadn't happened yet. Tonight, Tony and Pepper were standing at Tony's holographic table, studying some kind of schematic that JARVIS was projecting as a hologram. They both glanced up at his entry, and Pepper smiled broadly. “Hey, Steve,” she said. “Come in.”

He stepped out of the elevator at her invitation. “I don't like to interrupt,” he said.

“Don't worry about it, Mon Capitaine,” Tony said. “You look like a man with something on his mind. Care for a drink?”

“No, I can't stay long. I just... I need your advice. Pepper's advice, I mean.”

Tony spread his hand across the glow of his arc reactor, his face taking on an expression of horror. “I am cut to the quick!”

“Hush, Tony,” Pepper said. “Steve's being serious.” She set her glass aside on the table and came toward him. “What's up, Steve?”

Steve pulled the blue box out of his pocket and said, “I need help.”

Pepper took the box and opened it, gasping at the sight of the ring inside. “Steve, I don't think you need any help at all. This is  _gorgeous_ . Is it vintage?”

“No, it's new. I had it made. I designed it to look just like my Ma's, except the stone is different. My Ma's was a sapphire, but Darcy's birthday is in January.”

“Steve, it's _beautiful._ ” She looked up at him even as Tony took the box to inspect the ring. “When are you doing this?”

“Tonight,” he said firmly. “I want to do it tonight.” Then he paused and swallowed nervously. “Only, I don't... I don't know if she's expecting...”

“Oh!” Pepper exclaimed. “You don't know if she wants a big production or not.” She smiled. “Knowing Darcy, I would err on the side of _not_. You should probably just take her out to dinner, and then maybe take a nice walk in one of the smaller parks, and ask her there. Moonlight and a park, it's romantic enough that she knows you're trying without being ridiculously over-the-top. Whatever you do, _do not_ get down on one knee in the middle of the restaurant. She will murder you in your sleep.”

Steve laughed. “I make it a policy not to do things that will induce her to murder me in my sleep.” He reached out and snagged the ring box from Tony, slipping it back into his pocket. “All right. Maybe I'll take her to that place in Brooklyn where we had our first date.”

“Oh!” Pepper breathed. “I was going to offer our standing reservation at Le Cirque but Steve, that would be absolutely perfect.”

“Okay,” Steve said, nodding firmly. “I'll do that, then.” He gave Pepper and Tony both a weak grin. “Wish me luck.”

“Not that you're going to need it,” Tony said. “That girl's head over heels for you.”

“But good luck anyway,” Pepper said. “I know you're nervous, but try to enjoy it.”

Steve grinned. “Yes, ma'am.”

***

He  _was_ nervous - there was no doubt about that. But he kept it together, convincing Darcy to put on actual clothes and makeup again after her shower - no mean feat, but the promise of tiramisu convinced her - and then leaving a note for Bucky before putting her on the back of his bike. The ride down the island and across the Brooklyn Bridge took a little longer than usual because of the evening traffic, but they got to the little Italian place before it got too crowded. After they ate, he took her to Prospect Park to walk off the tiramisu. 

The botanical garden was already closed, but the rest of the park was still open, and they wandered the paths, hand in hand, until Steve found just the right spot: a secluded little nook surrounded by trees, where the only light was that of the moon. He tugged Darcy in close to him, his back against a tree, and he leaned down, pressing a gentle kiss to her lips. “I love you,” he murmured against her skin.

“I love you back,” she replied, grinning. She wrapped her arms around his waist and rested her head against his chest. They were silent for a moment, his hands smoothing down her back and nearly lulling her to sleep. She gave a soft, low chuckle. 

He nudged her gently. “Share the joke?”

“Just thinking about us,” she said. “How badly we had our wires crossed at first.”

He ran a hand through her hair. “I'm so sorry about all that.”

She reached up, resting two fingers against his lips. “No,” she murmured. “Don't apologize. It's not really your fault, you know.”

“You were nothing but kind to me and I was an asshole,” he replied. “How is that not my fault?”

“You were hurting,” she replied, tilting her head back to look up at him. “You were grieving, and you were struggling with your PTSD, and you didn't know which way was up. That is not your fault, and I don't blame you even a little bit for not having adequate coping mechanisms. I mean, Jesus, Steve, I've been to grief counseling and therapy and I've taken psych classes and everything, and I _still_ am not sure I'd be able to handle going through what you've been through.” She cupped his cheek with her hand. “The fact that you made it through all of that and came out on the other side _not_ locked up in a padded room somewhere is an absolute miracle, and that's just all there is to it.”

Unable to think of anything to say in reply to that, he leaned down and kissed her, hard and full of promise. “God, I love you,” he whispered when he let her go. He looked down into her eyes, wide and luminous in the moonlight, and the words spilled over before he even realized he was going to say them. “Marry me.”

She started back from him, her lips parting in shock. “Wh - what?”

He swallowed hard. That wasn't quite the response he'd been hoping for. But he tried again, taking her hand in his. With his other hand, he pulled the little ring box out of his pocket, thumbing it open so that she could see the sparkle of the moonlight on the gems. “Marry me, Darcy. I want you to marry me.”

She stared at him for a long moment, her face pale. “Oh my God,” she breathed. “You're serious.”

“Well... yeah,” he said, feeling his stomach start to clench. “I wouldn't ask if I didn't mean it.” He swallowed hard, taking in her dumbfounded expression, and he sighed, releasing her hand. “I'm sorry,” he said softly. “This was a mistake.”

“No!” Her hands shot out, grasping his where he had been about to close the box.

He stared at her. “No?”

“No, I mean - not _no_ , but, no, this wasn't a mistake.” She took a deep breath, her hands still holding his, and said, “I'm sorry. God, Steve, I'm so sorry. I just - I wasn't expecting this, I had no idea, and I just...” She paused, then laughed softly at herself. “God. I wasn't expecting this.”

He felt a glimmer of hope. She was babbling; she didn't do that often, and the last time was when he'd asked her to move in with him in D.C. This was, perhaps, a good sign. He straightened his shoulders. “Okay,” he said. “So take a breath.”

She grinned at him then. It was the same thing he'd said to her during their conversation about moving in together. She took a deep breath, and then another, and then she said, “I'm sorry. I didn't mean to spoil it.”

“You haven't spoiled anything,” he assured her, smiling back. “Are you better now?”

She nodded. “I'm better now,” she said. “Ask me again.”

This time he did it right, setting her back a step and going smoothly down on one knee. “Darcy Lewis, will you marry me?”

And now there were tears spilling down her face, catching on the apples of her cheeks and the lines around her smile. “Yes,” she whispered, offering him her left hand. It was trembling when he slid the ring onto her finger, but so were his hands, so he didn't think anything of it. He slipped the now-empty box back into his pocket and rose to his feet, catching her by the waist and lifting her up, holding her close and twirling her around.

She squealed with happiness, her arms wrapping around his neck, her fingers sliding into his hair. “I love you,” she murmured against his ear. “I love you, I love you.”

“I love you back,” he whispered against her neck, stilling and pressing her back up against one of the trees. “God, Darcy, I... I don't think I'd have made it through all of this without you.” He lifted a hand, cupping her cheek. “You've been everything to me, absolutely everything. You take such good care of me, and of Bucky, and I just... God.” he leaned forward, resting his forehead against the crook of her neck. “Thank you.”

She craned her neck to kiss his ear, taking a breath to speak, but whatever she was about to say was interrupted by a man's voice. “Everything all right here?”

They both looked up, Steve turning so fast that he very nearly dropped her. Confronting them was a uniformed NYPD officer, one hand on his gun. “Everything's fine, Officer,” Steve said, carefully letting Darcy down onto her feet.

“We had a call about a woman screaming down here,” the officer said. “Miss, do you need an escort anywhere?”

Darcy blinked at him, then gasped, realizing suddenly what he was saying. “No!” she exclaimed. “God, no. He - I - ” She paused, shaking her head, and managed to say, “He's my fiancé.” She put one hand over her face. “The scream was - it was probably me. He just asked me.”

The officer frowned at them both. “Can I see some I.D.?”

“Of course, Officer,” Steve replied. “My wallet's in my back pocket.” He reached with one hand into his pocket, taking care to keep his movements slow and telegraphed since the cop still had a hand on his gun. He flipped his driver's license out and offered it to the officer, who examined it. “Steve Rogers?” he said. “Born 1918?” He looked up at Steve, frowning. “That supposed to be a joke?”

“No, sir,” Steve replied. “It's accurate.” He cleared his throat, looking awkward. 

Darcy, having dug her own license out of her back pocket, interrupted. “He's Captain America. You might have heard of him.” She held out her own license.

The officer frowned at her license, then back down at Steve's, before looking up at him and narrowing his eyes. Steve sighed. “How about if we just move along from here, since we aren't doing anything illegal, and then you don't have to worry about us any more?”

With a grumble, the cop returned their licenses. “Yeah, maybe you should move along,” he said, as if it had been his idea. “This is a public place, you know.”

“Sure thing, Officer, you have a great night!” Darcy said, grabbing Steve's belt loop and tugging him along back toward the place where they'd parked the bike. By the time they arrived, she was giggling so hard she could barely breathe. “Oh, God!” she said when she'd leaned on the bike long enough to get her breath back. She grinned up at Steve, who grinned back. “Wait till I tell everybody how Captain America asked me to marry him and then we almost got arrested!”

He burst out laughing, leaning down to kiss her hard. Then he mounted the bike, waited for her to settle herself behind him, and headed for home.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fair warning: I don't know JACK about investing or money management. I made it all up.

When they got back to the apartment, they found a note from Bucky on the kitchen counter. It simply read,  _Bunking with Clint tonight. Don't wait up._ Darcy narrowed her eyes at Steve when she saw it. “He knew,” she said. “That's what you were talking about when I came home.”

Steve blushed. “He found the ring,” he admitted. “Basically asked me what the hell I was waitin' for.”

She reached out and pulled him to her, wrapping her arms around his waist. “Good,” she said simply.

He took her hands and tugged her along with him to sit on the couch. She tucked her feet up underneath her and leaned into him, letting him wrap his left arm around her. She rested her hands on his thigh, and his right hand came to rest on top of hers, playing a little bit with her ring. “We should talk, though. While... while he's not here.”

“About him, you mean?” Darcy asked. 

“Yeah.” Steve took a deep breath. “I know he seems okay most of the time, and people who didn't know him before might think that he's... back to normal.” His voice trailed off as he searched for words.

“But he isn't,” Darcy finished for him. “He's not the Bucky you knew before.”

Steve shook his head. “No. And he's not the Bucky I knew after Zola, either. That Bucky was hurting, and he was angry, but he was still mostly the same. This Bucky... he's definitely Bucky, but he's not... he's not  _Bucky._ ”

“No, he's not,” Darcy replied. “He's Bucky, plus whatever happened to him during the war, plus whatever happened to him after he fell. Whatever they made him do, whatever they did to him, those things can't help but change him.”

Steve nodded. “So... the thing is, it's like this.” He took a deep breath. “He asked me this afternoon, when he - when we were talking about you. He asked me if he was in the way.”

She sat up, staring at him in shock. “What did you tell him?”

“I told him that he would never be in the way,” Steve said, his voice firm. She needed to understand that this was non-negotiable. “I basically let him know that as long as I'm breathing, no matter what happens, he will always have a home with me.”

“With us,” she corrected him, reaching up to cup his face with one tender hand. “He will always have a home with _us_.”

Steve nodded, a soft smile forming on his face. “Okay. I just... needed to be sure that you understood.”

She smiled back. “That you and Bucky come as a package, and he's a dealbreaker? Yeah, I got that.” She leaned forward, kissing him gently. “I'm totally okay with that. It's not like we don't have enough room.”

“Well,” Steve said, tugging her into his lap. “It's just that, you know, between Bucky and the art room, that only leaves us one other bedroom, and if...”

Her smile became a slow grin. “Are you asking me about kids?”

He shrugged, flushing a little bit. “Yeah, I guess so.”

She kissed him again. “I would love to have children with you, Steve. If and when it happens, we'll deal with it. If we can't work out a bigger place here - and I mean, really, it's not like we're hurting for space - then we can always move someplace else.”

“Yeah,” Steve murmured. “We could get a place over in Brooklyn. One of those brownstone row houses.”

She grimaced. “I hate to break it to you, but most of those run in the millions of dollars and have been remodeled into apartments.”

“So?” he said, leaning to press a gentle kiss to her jaw. “So we can re-remodel one into a house again.”

“Did you miss the part where I mentioned the millions of dollars?”

He smirked at her. “Maybe we should have the money talk next.”

***

_Sometime between the Battle of Manhattan and what Steve is going to call his twenty-seventh birthday screw you Tony I am not ninety-four and that isn't funny, he gets a phone call from Pepper Potts. This phone call comes as a surprise, because he's met Pepper exactly once, and she was busy making sure Tony wasn't dead at the time, so they didn't really talk much beyond hi-how-are-you-it's-nice-to-meet-you._

_The phone call is a surprise; what Miss Potts says is even more surprising. She'd like him to come to the Tower at his earliest convenience; there are matters of some urgency that she needs to discuss with him. He wants to know more details, but she won't discuss it over the phone. So he agrees to come in the next day._

_He gets up the next morning and dresses nicely: crisply ironed slacks, a plain white button-up shirt, and a nice jacket. He goes back and forth about whether to wear a tie and eventually decides to do so; he would rather be too nicely dressed than not nicely dressed enough, and Miss Potts struck him as a pretty together sort of dame. Lady. Woman. Whatever._

_He arrives at Stark Tower just before two o'clock and goes inside; there is a receptionist in the lobby who sends him upstairs to the fifty-third floor. When he steps out, he finds himself in a maze of offices. Another receptionist at a desk that bears the Stark Industries logo checks a list, verifies that he has an appointment, and points him in the correct direction. At exactly two o'clock, he is giving his name to yet another receptionist, who taps on Miss Potts's door and announces him, then shows him in._

_When he enters the office, he is surprised first by its size and brightness - the floor-to-ceiling windows help with that - and then by the presence of other people besides Miss Potts. Miss Potts - “please, call me Pepper” - introduces him to Gerald Watterley, an accountant, and David Guteman, an attorney. She offers him tea or coffee, which he declines, and then asks him to sit. He does so, feeling a bit nervous and wondering what this is all about._

“ _The reason I didn't want to talk to you about this over the phone, Steve, is that as much as I respected Phil Coulson, I don't have a lot of trust to put in an agency like SHIELD. Knowing that they consider you an asset, and that they are very likely to be willing to go to a number of extremes to keep control of you and of people like you - like Tony, for example - there is very little doubt in my mind that they're probably monitoring your telephone conversations.”_

_Steve hadn't thought of that. “They can do that?”_

_She gives him a slight, twisty smile. “Legally, no.”_

_Steve frowns. “I don't think I like that very much.”_

“ _I didn't think you would. But they're not the reason I needed to speak with you, just the reason I didn't want to do so over the telephone.”_

“ _Ah,” Steve said. “Well, why don't you tell me what I can do for you, Miss Po - Pepper.”_

_Pepper smiles. “Actually, it's more about what I - or, technically, Tony - can do for you.” She folds her hands on the desk, glancing at a computer screen and reading off some information. “When you were recruited by Dr. Erskine, you joined the Army as a regular private, with a private's pay. When you were chosen for Project Rebirth, your pay grade was raised and you started collecting hazard pay. When you were transferred to the USO, that stopped, but then you went to Europe and made yourself famous. So when you went to work with the Strategic Scientific Reserve, you were paid as a captain, with additional grade raises for hazardous duty and so forth. And your pay didn't come through the usual Army paymaster; instead, it came through the SSR, which meant essentially that Howard Stark had your money.”_

_Steve nods. He knows this. He waits for her to get to the point. “I assume that you've been told about Howard Stark's search for you. For the first year or so, he flatly refused to believe that you were dead. And he had control of your money. You had, by the way, just over...” She pauses, touching a finger to the computer screen “Six thousand dollars.”_

_Steve nods. “Not much, I know, by today's standards.”_

“ _Adjusted for inflation,it translates to almost eighty thousand,” she replies gently. He feels his eyes bug out, but she continues. “And if Howard had taken that six thousand and left it to gather dust and interest in a bank account at six and a half percent, you'd have almost a half million sitting there today.”_

_Steve rubs at his face, his mind unable to process the idea of that amount of money. “If only,” he says sourly._

“ _Well, that's the thing,” Pepper says. “The reason I've asked these gentlemen to come and talk to you. Because Howard didn't just leave it sitting in a bank account. He... well, he borrowed it from you.”_

_Steve blinks. “I'm sorry, he did what?”_

_The lawyer - Guteman - clears his throat. “Mr. Stark left a very clear paper trail,” he says. “As Ms. Potts indicated, Mr. Stark refused to accept that you were dead. He was quite certain that the, er, process you underwent would protect you from the effects of the crash, and that he would be able to find and rescue you. So he drew up legal papers, and had them signed for you in absentia, and he borrowed your money to expand his company.”_

“ _He borrowed my... What?” Steve shook his head. “That doesn't even make any sense.”_

“ _Do keep in mind,” Pepper said, “that Howard Stark was essentially a mad genius.”_

_Steve pauses, thinks about Howard. Thinks about some of the crazy shit that sometimes came out of Howard's mouth. “Okay, I take it back. It makes perfect sense. So Howard borrowed my money and funneled it into Stark Industries?”_

“ _Yes,” Pepper says. She gestures to the accountant, Watterley._

_Watterley pulls something up on the tablet computer he's carrying and hands it to Steve. “It took us a bit of time, I must confess, in order for us to track down exactly what that money went to. It's so much easier when people just buy stock, but that was Howard for you. If it wouldn't get me fired, I'd tell you to your face that the man was completely insane.” He smiles slightly, and Pepper chuckles._

_Steve is staring at the screen. “I'm going to be honest, Mr. Watterley, I have no idea what I'm looking at.”_

“ _Ah, of course.” Watterley shifts closer, pointing out different parts of what is apparently a financial statement. “What we ended up doing was treating your money as if it had gone, in its entirety, to a purchase of Stark Industries stock at its market-closing price on the day Howard took control of it. Then we ran a simulation of how that stock would have reacted to the varying market fluctuations since that time, including splits and other activities. I don't mind telling you this, sir: I treated that stock as if it were my own. When dividends came due, I re-invested quite a lot of them in Stark, but I also moved some of them elsewhere. To be fair to the company, I tried to use only information that would have been available at the time, rather than 20/20 hindsight, which resulted in this rather unfortunate blip you see here - that was Enron, by the way. What a mess.” He pauses, shaking his head._

“ _I still have no idea what I'm looking at,” Steve says simply._

“ _Oh. Sorry. I get a little excited about numbers.” Watterley smiles slightly. “Sorry. The bottom line is this: the accounting department has come to the conclusion that you're owed this amount of money in cash and stocks.” He points to a number on the screen._

_Steve stares at the number for a moment. Then he looks up at Watterley. “Are you sure about that?”_

_Watterley nods. “Quite sure. I had three other people run the same numbers, and they mostly came up with the same or very similar figures. Mine was the highest, so Ms. Potts elected to choose it, for fairness's sake.”_

_Steve stares at her. “Are you serious?”_

_Pepper smiles. “Quite serious,” she says. “And in the further interest of fairness, I feel like I ought to tell you that if you decide to take it all in Stark Industries stock, I'll just give you the key to my office now and we'll call it a day.”_

_He looks down at the numbers again, processes for a long moment, and then looks back up at her. He feels the corner of his mouth twitch slightly. “It is a very nice office,” he says, “but I'd be willing to take a cashier's check instead.”_

_Pepper grins broadly._

***

“And that's the story of how you became a multi-millionaire while you were frozen in the ice,” Darcy murmured, staring at the bank statement Steve pulled up on his laptop screen. “Jesus Christ, Steve.”

“So,” Steve said, “like I was saying, if we wanted to, we could buy one of those places in Brooklyn and remodel it back into a proper house.”

“Steve,” Darcy said seriously, “I'm pretty sure if you wanted to, you could just buy _Brooklyn_.”

Steve snorted softly. “I'm not the only one; Bucky's pretty flush, too.” When she raised an eyebrow, he explained. “You know how Sam and I were working at the beginning of the summer to get his status changed from  _missing, presumed dead_ to  _prisoner of war_ ? Well, it turns out that if you're a prisoner of war, you continue to receive your pay from the Army until you're returned to American control. And you get automatic promotions to the next grade once you become eligible, according to time in service and time in grade.”

“So if Bucky was a Sergeant when he was captured...” Darcy began.

Steve nodded. “When they officially released him back in July, he was a Command Sergeant Major, with over forty years of service at that rank, and the maximum allowance on account of his... special circumstances. The base yearly salary  _without_ allowances is over eighty thousand.”

Darcy blinked. “Holy shit,” she said softly.

He laughed. “Yeah, that's pretty much what Bucky said when they told him.”

She shook her head, grimacing. “That kinda makes my three grand a month look...”

“Uh-uh.” Steve reached out and put a finger across her lips. “Nope.”

“But - ”

“No.” He shook his head. “Don't start that. First of all, you can call me old-fashioned if you want to, because believe me, I've gotten the full lecture from both Natasha and Pepper, but if I'm going to be your husband, it is my job to take care of you.”

“And I understand and respect that you feel that way,” Darcy said, “but I like being an equal partner in things, and I never will. Not like this.”

“There's nothing I can do about that,” Steve said. He leaned against the arm of the couch. “But Darcy, before this turns into a huge issue, stop and think about something. How would _you_ feel if you had a huge amount of money - maybe an inheritance or something - and I was upset because I'm just a soldier, and I'll never be able to bring that amount of money into the relationship and be an equal partner?”

“Well, that'd just be silly, because - ” she stopped, and her eyes narrowed. “Oh,” she said.

He grinned. “Exactly. So just look at it like that. Look, you get a paycheck from Stark Industries. So do I. And mine's not actually that much bigger than yours. The rest of this?” He waved an expressive hand at the computer. “That's an inheritance that I got from...” He paused, thinking, and then gave her a slight, pained grin. “From my grandfather Steve that I'm named for, that died in the war.”

“That is creepy as hell, do not ever say that again,” Darcy said. “But yeah, okay. Your words, they make sense to me against my will.”

“Oh, well,” Steve said, reaching out and pulling her to him. “That sounds like something I should apologize for.”

She pushed the laptop's lid closed, grinning. “I think so, too.”

He leaned in to her, but rather than kissing her lips, he pressed his open mouth against the side of her neck, sucking gently on her pulse point and making her shudder in his arms. “Let me show you just how sorry I can be,” he murmured against her skin, and she gasped, shivering as his hands slid under her top and his steps guided her gently toward his bedroom.

***

Clint had a channel on his television that showed nothing but football games all day and all night. “I'm telling you, man,” Bucky said as he popped the top off a microbrew beer, “this is the shit we fought for.”

Clint laughed. “So you could sit on my sofa, drinking fancy-ass beer and watching football games from the 1990s?”

“Hell yes,” Bucky replied. “Me and Stevie saw the Dodgers play one time in '38. They sucked. The Giants weren't bad, though; they went to the championship a few times. Won a couple, I think.”

“If you are a Giants fan, Barnes, I swear to God I will shoot you where you sit.”

Bucky laughed. “Nah. Football was never really our game. Me and Steve, we were always baseball guys.”

Clint glowered at him. “If you become a Giants fan, Barnes, I swear to God.”

“Who's your team?” Bucky asked.

“Detroit Lions,” Clint replied. He shrugged philosophically. “I like a good underdog.”

Bucky leaned over the dog that was lying on the sofa between them and tapped Clint's bottle with his own. “Here's to 'em, God love 'em. Somebody has to.”

Clint laughed and drank, and they settled in to watch the game currently on the screen. Clint had to explain a few of the newer rules, and Bucky had definite opinions about the amount of padding modern players wore - which somehow turned into a twenty minute rant about the designated hitter - but overall they both enjoyed a companionable evening. 

Around halftime of the second game, Bucky gave Clint a sideways look. “You ain't had much to say,” he commented.

Clint shrugged. “Lot on my mind,” he offered.

“That fella of yours?” Off Clint's raised eyebrow, Bucky added, “What?” a little defensively.

“Nothin',” Clint replied. “Just... I dunno. You sound like you're totally okay with it.”

“I am totally okay with it,” Bucky replied. “I don't give a shit who you sleep with, as long as you ain't hurtin' nobody.”

“That's...” Clint shook his head. “That's not what I was expecting.”

“What, you thought I'd call you a deviant and a pervert and throw rocks at you?” Bucky scoffed. “Be a little hypocritical.”

Clint stared at him. “You?”

“Me _what_?” Bucky replied, getting up and going for another beer with a smirk on his face.

Clint crossed his arms over his chest. “You're gay?”

“What's that word you kids use? Bisexual?” Bucky popped the cap off another beer, offering it to Clint, who took it with a nod.

“Yeah,” Clint said, watching as Bucky opened another for himself. “Yeah, that's one of them.” He cocked his head. “I just didn't know _you_ were...” He trailed off.

“Well, it wasn't exactly somethin' you advertised back then, you know?” Bucky replied, leaning against the wall. “Steve knows, in case you were wonderin'. And he ain't, in case you were wonderin' about _that_.” He smirked. “Where we grew up, in Brooklyn Heights, place was full'a queers. Queer bars, drag balls, men-only hotels and hostels. Don't even get me started on the alleyways around the Navy Yard. So yeah, I been knowin' bent folks my whole life. Wasn't no big deal, honestly. The cops'd come bustin' down doors and bustin' heads, but everybody knew they was just in it on account of the politicians and the rich folks' morality police bullshit. Hell, about a quarter of them was in the bars on Friday nights, you know? You'd see a fella in one of the raids lookin' like he weren't havin' such a good time, you knew. You'd see him help some gal get her lady friend out safe, or maybe on purpose miss a head and whack a shoulder or somethin', you knew.”

“Huh.” Clint put his feet up on the coffee table. “Did you... have anybody?”

“Not really,” Bucky said. “I wasn't the settlin' down type, you know? Steve'll tell you. Different gal every weekend, or a different guy. Whatever. Didn't much matter to me either way.” He paused. “There was one fella, though, before the war. I guess I was about twenty, so that'd make it... roughly 1937. He was livin' in a place on Middagh, writin' poetry.” He paused, smiling slightly. “Some of it was pretty good stuff, too. He never made it big, though. I looked him up. Died in the sixties.”

“Drug overdose?” Clint asked.

“Nah. Just got sick.” Bucky shrugged. “Happens to everybody, I guess.”

Clint nodded. He sat back on the sofa with a sigh. “I don't know what to do,” he admitted. 

“'Bout your fella, you mean?” 

“Yeah. I talked to him. Earlier this evening. He... there was this place in Washington Square Park where we used to go sit sometimes, when we both had down time together. Just... pretend to be normal for awhile, I guess.” He took a hefty swig of his beer. “He was there.”

“You knew he would be,” Bucky pointed out. “That's why you went.”

“Yeah.” Clint sighed. “I did.” He petted Max for a moment, gathering his thoughts. “So we talked. And I told him... I needed to know. You know? Why did he go, why he didn't... why he couldn't even call or write or _something_ to tell me he was alive.”

“So, what'd he say?”

Clint explained. He started with Loki, and how Loki had come through the Tesseract with his spear and turned the world blue, and how Clint had been responsible for bringing the team onto the Helicarrier, including the mercenary who had released Loki from his prison and thus allowed Phil to be harmed. He explained what he understood of the story that Phil had told him, how Phil had been dead for days and how Fury had violated both Phil's stated wishes - he'd had a No Extraordinary Measures rider on the Do Not Resuscitate order in his medical records - and his personal and bodily autonomy. And how Fury had then not told Clint anything about what he was doing, even though Clint was Phil's legal medical proxy, and how Fury had apparently changed and erased Phil's memories and implanted new ones, along with what amounted to post-hypnotic suggestions regarding how Phil should behave in regards to Clint.

By the time Clint was done speaking, Bucky had had to put his beer down lest he throw it at the wall. “Are you fuckin' kidding me with this shit?” Bucky demanded. “I don't know who this Fury guy is, but you better tell me if I meet him, because when I do, I'm puttin' my fist through his goddamn face.”

Clint gave a humorless laugh. “Get in line.” They were silent for a moment, both calming themselves.

“So,” Bucky said. He returned to the couch, placing his beer on the coffee table and seating himself sideways so that he was facing Clint. “What's there to know about what to do?”

“I feel like... like everybody's waiting on me to decide. About moving forward. With, you know, the Initiative and stuff. And whether or not to bring him and his team in, which, look. Don't get me wrong. I am and will always be grateful that they actually give a shit about how I feel. But it's like... I feel like it's all on me to decide this, and that's... that's a lot of responsibility on me.”

“You sure that's what's all on you?” Bucky asked, a knowing look on his face. “Is it really about the Initiative, and workin' with him? Or is it about how you feel about him, and whether or not you can handle bein' around him and wantin' to be with him?”

Clint stared at Bucky for a minute. “You're kind of an asshole.”

Bucky shrugged. “You obviously still love him,” he said. “Otherwise you wouldn't be so bound up in knots about it.”

“Yeah,” Clint admitted. “I do.”

“Well,” Bucky said, “here's how I see it. I got fucked in the head by HYDRA, and nobody holds it against me what I did while that was goin' on. You got fucked in the head by Loki, and nobody holds it against you what you did. Right?”

Clint nodded. “So if Phil got fucked in the head, too,” he continued, seeing where Bucky was going.

“Exactly,” Bucky said. “So, you know, go with that.” He shifted in his seat, grabbing his beer. “Turn the game back on, willya, Barton? Nobody cares about your damn feelings.”

Clint snorted and turned the sound back on. After a few minutes, he spoke again. “Thanks,” he said softly.

Bucky reached out, clinking his beer bottle against Clint's. “Here's to us,” he said softly. “God love us.”

Clint chuckled. “Somebody's got to.”


	8. Chapter 8

He doesn't sleep any more.

_(tools do not sleep, they are stored until the next use)_

He isn't sure he would remember how, even if he were permitted to lie down. So he does not sleep. He is removed from the cold, warmed, fueled, briefed, deployed. When his mission is accomplished, he returns. He is debriefed, repaired, refueled if necessary, and stored. There is no sleep. There is only the cold.

He feels the cold now, seeping into his bones, but he ignores it; the cold does not matter. Only the mission matters.

He makes his way on silent feet through the darkened apartment. He steals past the easel that bears a portrait of a strangely familiar face; past the kitchen that he's sure he's been in before; past the staircase that leads up to a set of rooms that he thinks he knows. Past everything, into the bedroom.

He stands in the doorway and he faces the mission.

Moonlight floods the room, lining the faces of his targets with pure silver-white light. In sleep, they curl together; the man's arm wrapped around the woman's waist, spooned up behind her, his knees tucked into hers, his face half-hidden behind her hair. The sheet is gathered at their waists. The woman is wearing a faded grey t-shirt emblazoned ARMY; the man is bare-chested.

He has his orders.

_(the mission the mission the mission)_

He carries them out.

The man's eyes fly open when the blade bites into his throat; he struggles, but it's already too late. His struggles wake the woman; she is disoriented, sleep-mazed, and with the man already disabled, clutching at his throat and bleeding out rapidly, it is not at all difficult to simply cross the mattress, clambering over the man's body to wrap his metal hand around the woman's throat.

Her hands come up to claw at his arm, struggling to escape his murderous grip, but there is no escape. There is no plea that will soften his dead heart; there are no tears that will convince him to have mercy. There is only the mission, and he bears down, crushing her larynx and twisting, shearing her spine. She dies before the panicked blue eyes of the man who lies helplessly next to her.

He stands, watching the man; he must confirm the kill, and he cannot do so until death is certain.

_(confirmed kill in ten hours)_

And as he watches the man struggle to breathe, he realizes that the man is trying to speak.

What the target says is irrelevant; there is only the mission. But he leans forward anyway, his brow furrowing as he tries to understand the word on the man's blood-flecked lips.

_Bucky_ .

Who the hell is - 

***

Bucky woke to the sudden sensation of falling; at first, he thought he was falling off the train again, but then he hit the floor and Max whined in his ear and he realized that he was lying face-down on the carpet of Clint Barton's guest room, his legs tangled in the sheets and his shirt stuck to him where he had sweated through it.

His heart was racing but he concentrated on his breathing, using the calming routine Bruce had taught him to quiet his body and focus his mind. Once he'd managed that, he pushed himself upright into a sitting position and folded his legs beneath him, reaching out and pulling Max into his lap. He buried his forehead against the dog's wiry fur and trembled.

_It was so real. It was so fucking real._

He remembered the mission clearly; it had been the early eighties, and the target had been a high-level Lithuanian government official. The woman had been his mistress. The kill had gone down just as Bucky remembered it; it had been messy enough that he'd been forced to wash both himself and his armor before leaving. He had gotten lost in the hot water from the shower, in the unaccustomed sensation of being warm and clean, and he had spent so long standing there under the spray that he'd almost gotten caught. He'd been late to his extraction point, and they'd punished him for it, then punished him again when he refused to explain why he'd been late. 

Reliving it was bad enough; when it was just the memories of the kills themselves, he could usually use the tactics that Sam taught him to distance himself from the memories, to remind himself that it wasn't him doing the killing, that his mind and his will had not been his, and he had been a puppet moving at the pull of invisible strings.

Reliving it, and having his mind replace the actual victims' faces with those of the people he loved was just unfair.

Max whined at him again, and he realized that he was still trembling - and he had progressed to full-body shakes. That wasn't good. That wasn't good at all. He needed - he needed - 

_help_ .

He untangled his legs from the sheets and pushed himself up to his feet. He started to leave, to go straight home, but he paused in the doorway, turned, looked back. His clothes - his pants, his button-up shirt, his socks, his shoes - were all in the chair. The sheets were tangled and the bed wrecked. Max's vest was lying on the night stand. He stopped.

He forced himself to breathe. He went back into the room.

_Focus on the task at hand_ . He pulled the sheets up, untangled them, smoothed them across the narrow mattress. He pulled up the coverlet. He replaced the pillow. He pulled his jeans on, rolled up Max's vest, and tucked it into his back pocket. He picked up his shirt, stuffed his socks into his left shoe, and looked around. 

It wasn't perfect, but it was neat enough. It'd never pass inspection in a barracks, but frankly he didn't care about that right now. Bucky made his way on silent assassin's feet out the door, down the stairs. He slipped from the apartment, Max on his heels, and shut the door, turning the thumb lock for form's sake. 

It took every ounce of self-control inside of him not to run down the hall, but he didn't. He focused on his breathing, synced it with his heartbeat, and measured his steps. Max trotted along beside, looking up at him occasionally with concern. He tried to smile, but it didn't work.

The door was unlocked; he pushed it gently open and listened. The apartment was dark and, except for the occasional snore from the downstairs bedroom, utterly silent. He entered, pushed the door shut behind him. He guided the dog to his bed in the corner and Max settled down easily, watching Bucky with his golden eyes. Bucky dropped his clothing in the nearest chair and moved toward the bedroom door.

Moonlight flooded the room, lining the faces of his friends with pure silver-white light. In sleep, they curled together; Steve's arm wrapped around Darcy's waist, spooned up behind her, his knees tucked into hers, his face half-hidden behind her hair. The sheet was gathered at their waists. Darcy wore a faded grey t-shirt emblazoned ARMY; Steve was bare-chested. He watched them for a long time, matching his breathing to theirs, letting his heart finally slow itself down into a normal rhythm.

_Just a nightmare. They're fine._

He fought back the cry of relief that wanted to escape from his throat. He let his eyes roam their figures, desperate, until Darcy shifted in her sleep, rolling onto her back. When she moved, her left hand caught the light, and the shine of the ring on her finger brought a lump to Bucky's throat. So Steve had finally asked her, and she'd said yes. He found himself stumbling forward, sinking to his knees beside the bed, his eyes glued to her hand.  _Thank God_ , his mind echoed.  _Thank God_ .

He shifted, sitting on the floor beside the bed, and pulled his knees up to his chest, shivering. He could feel the cold seeping in again. He reached up, ever so gently, and found Darcy's hand where it lay on the mattress, and he pulled it to him. She made a soft, questioning sound; he turned his head and realized that he'd wakened her. He pressed his face against the edge of the mattress and pulled her hand over, resting it on top of his head. Her fingers tangled in his hair.

She closed her eyes again, humming softly in the back of her throat, and her fingers scratched gently at his scalp as she fell asleep again. That was good; the warmth of her touch made the cold go away. He closed his eyes as her fingers went still and stayed there, curled up, with her hand resting on top of his head. The room was silent except for the hum of the air conditioner and Steve's occasional soft snore. He took one deep, shuddering breath, and then he let the tears come, flowing silently down his face.

***

Bucky woke the next morning when Steve and Darcy did; Steve rolled out of bed on the other side of the mattress, with a yawn and a stretch accompanied by a loud groan, and Bucky sat up, blinking in surprise. He hadn't realized that he'd fallen asleep, and he had slept the rest of the night dreamlessly. The awful feeling that his dream had left behind had faded into little more than a vague, unsettled feeling, but he didn't care for it much and he wanted it to go away.

Darcy, awakened by Steve's morning noises, rolled over onto her side, stretching, and blinked at him. He blinked back. “Hi,” she said softly, her fingers reflexively scratching at his scalp where they still rested on his head. “Did you have a bad night?”

He nodded, trying not to look pitiful; it was bad enough that he couldn't even manage to sleep through the night on his own. But Steve didn't know he was there; he turned back toward Darcy and said, “No, why would - oh.”

Bucky cringed a little bit at the sound of Steve's voice, hiding his face again, but it was no use. Steve came around the side of the bed and took a knee beside him, pulling Bucky into his arms. “Want to talk about it?”

Bucky shook his head, pressing his forehead against Steve's collarbone. He did not ever, _ever_ want to tell Steve what he'd dreamed. It was one thing to talk about flashbacks - especially to the war; they both had those. But sit here and tell Steve that he'd dreamed about cutting his throat, snapping Darcy's neck? No. He couldn't stand the thought that Steve might recoil from him in horror or turn away from him, unable to stomach the sight of him.

No. It was better to keep that to himself, to suffer in silence until he could find a way to purge the very thought from his mind. So he clenched his jaw and he shook his head, and Steve hugged him tightly. He hugged Steve back, and he didn't even jump very much when Darcy leaned half off the bed to hug both of them. He allowed himself to exist inside their embrace, to internalize the knowledge that he was safe, that they were alive, and that the nightmare had been just that: a terrible fiction, inflicted upon him by some still-damaged part of his brain. Everything was okay.

And then he remembered, reaching out to take Darcy's left hand in his. He held it up, letting the stones on the ring catch the morning sunlight, and Darcy laughed softly into his ear, shifting to sit behind him so that her weight wasn't resting on his shoulder and upper back. “Yeah, he finally got off his butt last night,” she said. “We went to dinner at that little Italian place in Brooklyn, and then we went for a walk in Prospect Park. And then we almost got arrested.”

His head whipped around, his eyes getting big as he looked back and forth between them, searching for more information. Steve laughed, picking up the thread of the story. “I asked her,” he said, “and at first she thought I was joking. Which, I have to say, was not great for my ego.”

Bucky covered his eyes with his metal hand, shaking his head. Both Steve and Darcy laughed, and Steve continued. “So once I convinced her that I was serious, she did that thing girls do, you know, when they shriek at ear-piercing levels and jump on you, and that's supposed to tell you that they're _happy_.” He reached out, grinning, and took Darcy's free hand in his.

“But there was apparently a uniformed patrol officer not far away,” Darcy said, taking the story back. “So he came to check and make sure I wasn't getting raped or killed. And then I guess he got all disgruntled that he didn't get to play the big thundering hero, so he starts with the _I need to see some I.D._ business, which of course turned into _how are you only twenty-eight and this says you were born in 1918._ ”

Bucky shook his head, rolling his eyes. The two of them could get into more trouble accidentally than a bag full of kittens in a yarn shop. He cupped Darcy's hand in both of his, patting it warmly, and he smiled. This was a good thing, and he was glad it was happening, and really he would kind of like to say so out loud but it looked like his voice wasn't working today, so he'd have to manage.

Darcy draped herself over his shoulder. “No talking today?” she asked.

Sometimes, he reflected, it was like she could read his mind. She was going to be terrifying when she had kids of her own. He nodded in reply, and she squeezed him around the shoulders. “That's okay,” she said. “You know you don't have to talk if you're not up to it.” 

He nodded again, patting her hands, trying to let her know as best he could that everything was okay, really, he'd be fine again before too long. He shifted, preparing to rise, and she sat up to let him. He gave Steve a gentle shove toward the bathroom -  _ hit the showers, punk _ \- and made his way out to the kitchen, making sure to clatter a little bit as he got a pan out to make breakfast. They were very quiet in the bedroom for a minute, but by the time he started cracking eggs into a bowl, he could hear the shower running.

***

After breakfast he went upstairs, had his own shower, prepared for the day. He stared at himself in the mirror while brushing his teeth, wondering if he should cut his hair. He knew it drove Steve nuts to see him with long hair, but Darcy repeatedly told him it was cute and that the look suited him. He spat, he rinsed. He thought,  _ maybe I'll let it get really long, like Thor's _ . He grinned at himself in the mirror.  _ That'd be a sight to behold _ .

Max was sitting by the door when Bucky came downstairs, a thing he only did when he needed to go out. Steve said, “Hey, Bucky, what if we all go on Max's walk? We could go up to Starbucks and get you one of those coffee milkshake things.”

“Frappuccino,” Darcy corrected him.

Steve waved a hand. “Whatever.” He tossed Bucky a wink, and Bucky grinned at the grumpy expression that crossed Darcy's face. He nodded in reply to the suggestion, retrieving Max's harness from the hanger behind the door and then dressing the dog in his little red vest. Max eagerly wagged his whole body, ready to go. Bucky opened the door and went out into the hallway, Max right beside him; Darcy followed, and Steve brought up the rear, pulling the door shut behind himself. 

The coffee shop was jammed, so Bucky and Darcy waited outside at one of the cafe tables with Max while Steve went inside to get their drinks. They'd been sitting there for perhaps five minutes, watching through the window as Steve stood patiently in line, when they were joined by Clint and Sam. “Hey, bro,” Clint said, clapping Bucky on the shoulder. “Missed you this morning; I was gonna make French toast.”

Bucky made an apologetic face. Darcy said, “He had a nightmare and came home.”

“Ah.” Clint nodded, understanding. “I get that. It's cool. Hey, Sam, you wanna see if Captain Morally Upright will let you cut in line?”

Bucky snorted softly. Sam chuckled. “Don't let him hear you say that,” he warned. “What are you getting?”

“Regular drip,” Clint replied, handing Sam a five-dollar bill. “Plain old burnt beans.”

“Yeah, that sounds right.” Sam cuffed him gently on the back of the head as he passed him and entered the shop.

Clint plopped himself down in a chair and started to reach down to pet Max, but paused in his movement when Bucky caught his hand and shook his head. “Oh, that's right,” he said. “No petting when the dog is working. I forgot. Sorry, man.”

Bucky released him, offering a  _ no big deal _ shrug. Darcy said, “It's a no-talking day.” 

Clint studied Bucky for a minute. “Was it because of what we talked about?”

Darcy's gaze sharpened, but Bucky shook his head before she could intervene. She looked like she was going to speak anyway, so he reached out and laid his right hand over her left, squeezing gently. He shook his head at her.  _ Let it go _ . She pressed her lips together tightly, but didn't speak. He gave her a gentle smile. Then he reached out with his left hand, poking Clint in the arm, and pulled Darcy's arm across the table, displaying the ring on her finger.

Clint's eyes got huge. He looked from the ring up to Darcy and back again. A broad smile curled across his face. “So he finally got off his ass,” he said.

Darcy's cheeks turned pink. “Yeah,” she admitted. “Last night.”

“Good for him,” Clint said. “I knew something was going on, but this mook wouldn't say what it was, just that you two were gonna need some time to yourselves.”

The pink flush on her face deepened to red. “Thanks, Bucky,” she said sourly.

Bucky grinned broadly, reaching up to tap her on the nose. She shook her head, laughing softly. “You're a jerk.” He shrugged, spreading his hands as if to say  _ And you're surprised? _

***

When the work day began, Bucky considered his options. He followed Steve and Darcy absently up to sixty-five, but spending all day watching them deal with the administrivia of setting up and running their new organization was really not his idea of a good time. He stood at the windows for a long time, sipping his chocolate-flavored coffee ( _ this is  _ _ **definitely** _ _ what I fought a war for _ ) and contemplating the skyline of the city, wondering what he ought to do with his time. 

It was a worthwhile question; he might be broken, but he wasn't useless. He had a skill set that the team could use. The idea of hurting, of killing innocent people, was completely abhorrent to him - but if the Avengers were called out, they weren't going up against innocent people. He'd seen footage of the Battle of New York, and those godforsaken  _ things _ that had come out of the sky. He could fight those things; he could protect his city. He could protect the people he loved.

Bucky tapped on Darcy's office door; when she looked up, he jerked his thumb toward the elevator and mimed lifting weights. She nodded and waved at him, and he waved back, calling his dog and heading out. When he passed Frustrating Kevin's desk, he paused and offered the young man the knuckle-side of his metal fist. Kevin, who never seemed to know quite what to make of Bucky, bumped his own fist tentatively against Bucky's. Bucky grinned, tapped the brim of Kevin's newsboy hat down about an inch, and ducked into the elevator.

Then he stood there, staring at the blank wall. He'd forgotten that JARVIS controlled the elevators. He took a deep breath, then paused. He tried again. He sighed.

And then JARVIS spoke. “Bucky,” he said gently, “I am given to understand that you are having difficulties with speech today. There is a direct data input option.” A panel on the wall slid back, revealing a digital touch screen. Bucky leaned his head briefly against the door in gratitude, then punched  _ 85 _ into the input panel. There was a microsecond's pause, and then JARVIS said, “Floor eighty-five, Avengers' gymnasium level.” The panel slid closed, and the elevator car began to move. JARVIS said, “In the future, if you need to access the direct data input option, you may simply tap on the panel, and access will be granted.”

Bucky patted the wall again in thanks. He waited for the elevator to stop, and when the doors opened, he crossed the gym and entered the obstacle course.

He stood for a long moment, studying the room's layout. The place looked like a war zone - with good reason. The whole purpose of the place was to train for exactly that. He briefly considered tying Max up to something secure near the door, but then he changed his mind. Max had never been exposed to gunfire; he might panic. It would be better for him to be elsewhere. He ducked back out, taking Max to the locker room and securing him inside. He would have access to water there, and if he needed to relieve himself, the tile floor would be easily cleaned. Most importantly, Max himself would be safe. Then Bucky returned to the obstacle course room.

He looked for a panel on the wall that might indicate a touch-screen input, but did not see one. Finally, he simply tapped on a panel and hoped JARVIS was as intelligent as he seemed. The response came immediately; JARVIS said, “Unfortunately there is no direct input option available in this room; I will suggest it to Mr. Stark at the first opportunity. Scenario option one is melee training; option two is ranged practice.” Bucky tapped twice on the wall. JARVIS said, “The weaponry storage is to your left. When you are ready to begin, please indicate by tapping the wall again.”

There was a click, and a door swung open. Bucky went to investigate and discovered a small armaments cupboard. There wasn't a very extensive selection of weaponry, and what was there skewed heavily toward American (mostly Stark) made items. If he was going to really do this, he'd need to obtain some of his own preferred weaponry. In the meantime, he pulled out a Savage 110 bolt-action rifle and a box of ammunition. He took a few minutes to check the gun over; it was obviously well-maintained, and a few test shots showed him that the scope was true and the aim accurate. 

He assessed the room, looking for high spots, and grinned when he located one that looked well-used. That must be Barton's sniper nest. If it was good enough for the archer, it was good enough for him - for now, at least. He gave the wall a quick tap to let JARVIS know that he was ready, slung the Savage over his shoulder, and headed up.

He could hear the mechanisms moving in the floor and in the walls as the room was reset; by the time he reached the nest, the clicks and hums had stopped. JARVIS asked him if he was interested in a soundtrack, but he just shook his head. Better to focus, the first time out. He set himself up, examined the sight lines, familiarized himself with the feeling of having a gun in his hands. He hadn't held one since that first night in the tower, when he'd tied up all of his weapons in his shirt and handed them to Steve. He hadn't looked back, and didn't regret for a moment giving them up. He knew Steve still had them; he knew where they were, wrapped up in a cloth and tucked away in a drawer. If he indicated that he wanted them, Steve would give them to him. He knew that.

This was different.

He took a deep breath.  _ Focus. _ He slowed his breathing, listened to his heartbeat, and focused on the course. He felt his eyes narrow as his first target appeared and the world fell away, leaving nothing but the target and the space between heartbeats.

The Winter Soldier went to work.

***

When he came down out of the nest, he said, “JARVIS, is there any way to get some kind of... I dunno, a printout or something, showing how I did?”

“Of course,” JARVIS replied. “Where shall I send it?”

“Where's Steve?”

“Captain Rogers is in Miss Lewis's office.”

“Send it there, please,” Bucky said. “And tell them I'm on my way down.”

“If I may,” JARVIS said, “it is nice to hear your voice.”

Bucky smiled slightly as he returned the Savage to the weapons closet. “Thanks, JARVIS,” he said. “It's kind of nice to have one.”

He swung through the locker room and retrieved Max, then headed for the elevator. “Sixty-five, please,” he said, smiling slightly. The car began to sink, and he reached down to ruffle Max's head. “Good boy,” he said softly. The dog's tail thumped against the floor.

When the doors opened, Bucky stepped out, feeling like he had a little of the old swagger in his hips. He gave Frustrating Kevin a cocky smirk, and felt it widen to a grin when the young man actually blushed. Clicking his tongue at Max, he headed into the office space, cutting directly across to Darcy's office. Steve was still there, and both of them were looking at several sheets of paper. 

Upon his entrance, Steve looked up at him. “Bucky, JARVIS sent these to Darcy's printer. Do you...?” His voice trailed off, his eyes widening as he studied Bucky. “You... you okay, there, Buck?”

Bucky grinned. “Been better, pal,” he said, “but it was a damn long time ago.”

Darcy let out a soft sigh. “You got your voice back.”

“More than that,” Bucky replied. He pointed at the papers. “Been on the obstacle course, up in Barton's little nest. That Savage is a good gun, but I still like the Dragunov better.”

“You were practicing?” Steve asked, clearly surprised.

Bucky nodded, leaning back against the glass wall. “The Winter Soldier is a tool,” he said softly. “That's what he's for. He has a specific skill set and a specific function.” He took a deep breath, then held his hands out in front of himself, palm up. “But the thing about a tool is that if you have it, if it's in your hands...” He closed his fists. “You can use it.”

Steve looked down at the printout. “You have a hundred percent accuracy and an average response time of less than three seconds.”

“I have a tool,” Bucky replied. “And I know how to use it.”

“The Winter Soldier is a tool,” Darcy said softly. “What about Bucky Barnes?”

“Bucky Barnes is not the Winter Soldier,” Bucky replied. “I'm not him. Not any more. But the thing about him is that he's inside of me. Like...” He paused, searching for words, then shook his head. “I can't explain it. It's almost like a suit. I put him on, and then I take him off again. He ain't me... but I can  _ use _ him. Does that make sense?”

Steve reached out and put his hand on Bucky's shoulder. “Bucky,” he said, “I know  _ exactly _ what you mean.”


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I keep meaning to say this and I keep forgetting, but I want to say a sincere thank you to everyone who has left comments and kudos on this fic. I really appreciate all of you, and I'm so glad that you're all still enjoying the story. I love hearing from you, so keep 'em coming! :)

On the third morning after her disastrous attempt at making contact with Bucky Barnes, Skye was sprawled across her bed reading the newest edition of  _ Harley Quinn  _ when a tap on the doorframe caused her to look up _.  _ “Hey, Boss,” she said, setting her comic aside. “What's up?”

Phil Coulson entered the motel room that was Skye's for the duration, seating himself at the tiny table under the window. “I was wondering what you have for me on Barnes.”

Skye slipped off the bed and grabbed her laptop, seating herself in the other chair and flipping it open. “The search isn't finished running,” she said, “but I can tell you what I've got so far.” She began to scan the information on the screen. “The only thing coming up under searches of Bucky or James Buchanan Barnes is the official stuff: his life history in the twenties, thirties, and forties, up through his supposed death in 1945. I did find the official reports on his unit getting captured by HYDRA, though. That's very interesting reading.”

“How so?”

“Well,” Skye said, turning the screen a bit so that Coulson could see it, “in Barnes and Rogers's official reports, they both mention that Barnes had apparently been singled out for  _ interrogation _ , and that Rogers retrieved him from an interrogation room - which I'm pretty sure is code for  _ torture chamber. _ And the other Commandos, they also refer to it as  _ interrogation _ . But there were a lot of other guys in that HYDRA base besides the Commandos, and if you look at their reports, they don't say interrogation. They say  _ experimentation _ .”

“Are there any details?”

“Not many,” Skye admitted. “Aside from Barnes, none of the experimentation-or-interrogation victims survived. But there was a Free French soldier called Rousseau who stated that he was put on gravedigging duty, and he swore that one of the bodies was a guy he recognized from his own unit, and what he described...” She gestured at the screen.

Coulson read silently for a moment. “That sounds like...”

“Like a Hulk,” Skye finished, nodding.

“Zola was trying to perfect the Erskine formula.”

“That's what I think,” Skye agreed. “And he must have gotten at least partway with the version used on Barnes; that has to be how he survived the fall from that train.”

Coulson nodded. “Have you got anything else so far?”

Skye shook her head. “A lot of stuff about the Winter Soldier, but so far it's all intelligence chatter. Suspicions that he might be active, may have had a hand in this or that assassination. Nothing for sure yet, but as soon as I know something, I'll let you know. I'm getting into the really deep stuff now, so if there's anything that's not paper-only, I should start hitting it soon.”

Coulson nodded. “Let me know,” he said. He ran a hand through his hair. “I might go knock on Stark's door today.”

“Is that a good idea?” she asked. “He seemed pretty adamant about you  _ not _ doing that.”

“He said not to break in,” Coulson replied. “He didn't say not to turn up and ask to see him.”

Skye looked skeptical. “Still, it might be better if you wait. I mean, you said yourself that they'll come around. Right?”

Coulson sat back in his chair. “I do think they will. But I don't know how long that will take, and we can't just sit around forever. Every day we take to consolidate our own footing is another day that HYDRA has to consolidate theirs.”

“Doesn't look like that's gonna be much of an issue,” said a new voice from the doorway. Skye and Coulson both looked up to see Trip standing there, holding his cell phone. “I just got a call from Darcy Lewis. She wants us at the tower this afternoon.”

“She called you?” Coulson asked, his brow furrowing a little in confusion.

Trip shrugged. “I... may have reached out. To her and Barnes. On a personal level.”

“A personal level?” Skye asked. “What, you offered to make friends?”

“Sort of,” Trip replied, leaning against the doorframe. “I invited 'em to the Howlies Family Reunions.”

Coulson whimpered softly. Trip smirked. Skye rolled her eyes. “I'm surrounded by teenage nerds.”

***

If there was one thing Darcy Lewis could appreciate in life, it was efficiency. The way that the X-Men functioned was a thing of efficient beauty to behold, and Darcy mused that she would like, when she grew up, to be a part of a machine as well-oiled as that.

When the Initiative contacted Charles Xavier about hiring a psychic, he had expressed some skepticism at first. But after Darcy explained what it was that they were looking for, and what they were prepared to offer in return, he said, “Actually, I believe we may have just the person.”

The next day, Ruth Aldine arrived. Xavier sent her personal information along beforehand, so Darcy knew who she was dealing with. Aldine, also called Blindfold, was a member of the Young X-Men and had clairvoyant, precognitive, and telepathic abilities. She would, in Xavier's opinion, be the perfect person to not only vet all new recruits for any hidden HYDRA attachments, but also to keep a sort of free-floating monitor on the Initiative's employees, keeping a watch out to make sure no one was compromised.

Pepper had arranged an apartment for Ruth on one of the regular residential floors in the second building of the tower complex: secure, with full access to the Initiative but without access to the highest levels. It was close to an elevator, attractively furnished, and outfitted with all of the best adaptive technologies for blind individuals. Unlike most of the other general-residence apartments, it also had access to JARVIS.

She came on the back of Wolverine's motorcycle, with a few days' worth of clothes in a backpack. Darcy and Bucky met her in the lobby and guided her up to her apartment, where Bucky explained about JARVIS and introduced the young woman to the AI. They gave her some time to get acquainted with the layout of her new apartment before Logan said, “If you're good, kid, I'm gonna take off; your stuff'll be here in a day or two.”

“Yes, fine, thank you, Logan,” Blindfold replied. “I think, thank you, that this will be quite all right.”

Logan nodded and gave her a pat on the back. He bumped Bucky's shoulder with his own on the way out the door. “Good to see you up and about,” he said.

“You, too, pal,” Bucky replied. “Hey, listen - thanks for everything, yeah?”

Logan gave him a sardonic half-smile. “Yeah, you bet, bub.” Then he was gone.

Blindfold said, “I think, yes, that there is work to be done?”

“Yes,” Darcy said. “Let's go on up to sixty-five and I'll introduce you around.”

***

Let it never be said that Kevin Fine did not like his job. In fact, he liked his job very, very much. His entire _raison d'etre_ at Stark Industries was to sit at a desk in front of an elevator on the sixty-fifth floor and be utterly and completely obstructionist.

The job had been _tailor made_ for Kevin.

He didn't even know what they did on that floor. He knew it had something to do with the Avengers, because Captain America was in and out of the place constantly and sometimes the others came in or out as well, but beyond that? They could have been building nuclear bombs or dissecting alien corpses and Kevin would not have known or cared about it.

All he cared about was the few feet of space between the elevator and his desk: his tiny kingdom to rule with an iron fist.

The first threat to his unshakeable majesty was the guy with the dog and the metal arm. Kevin had immediately pegged him as some kind of reformed hobo; he had a permanent air of confusion about him and he dressed like he didn't own a mirror and his hair was always in his eyes and half the time he didn't shave and Kevin was pretty sure the dog probably hadn't had its shots and was likely to bite.

But that _ass_. Kevin would put up with _a lot_ for an ass like that.

He was pretty sure, though, that the guy - his name was _Bucky_ of all things, who the hell named their kid _Bucky_?! - was out of his league. Kevin himself was a solid eleven on a scale of one to ten, and he knew it, but there was something about Bucky that was just... different. For one thing, he was apparently really close friends with Captain America. _Really close_. Like, Kevin was pretty sure there was something going on between him and Captain America (and possibly Ms. Lewis, because _seriously_ ).

For another thing, there was something about him that was, for lack of a better term, pants-wettingly terrifying. Kevin had seen veterans with PTSD before; their thousand-yard stare should practically be patented. But there was something about Bucky, just sometimes, that made Kevin's balls shrivel up and try to climb inside.

Some days Bucky was okay, if a little vague. Some days, Bucky was a stone-cold killer. And ass or no ass, Kevin valued his life. But there were times, like the day when Bucky came in with Ms. Lewis and the girl wearing the blindfold, when Kevin could almost convince himself that the risk to his life would be worth it. Because when he came in that day, he was different. He was standing tall, and his shoulders were square, his eyes were sharp and clear, and his carriage was almost arrogant. And he was wearing a pair of jeans that hugged the curve of that ass so beautifully that they could have made Michelangelo weep.

Kevin struggled to pay attention as he was introduced to Ruth Aldine, and Ms. Aldine was granted full access to floor sixty-five. He added her name to his list, not that he was likely to forget that very unique individual. Her lips twitched when he thought it, and she said to him, “You are, excuse me, very unique yourself, I think. But he is not for you. I think, yes, you already know this.”

Kevin stared at her in shock, but she said nothing else to him; she turned instead to Ms. Lewis and said, “He is clear, all is well. Let us proceed.”

Ms. Lewis and Ms. Aldine went past Kevin and into the floor proper. Bucky did not; instead, he and his dog stood beside Kevin's desk for a moment. Kevin struggled to get his jaw up off the floor, and in the process suddenly realized that Bucky smelled like Old Spice. He blinked. He'd have pegged Bucky as an Axe kind of guy. As he was considering this, Bucky turned and glanced at him. “That dame creeps me the hell out,” he said conversationally.

“She's a little unusual,” Kevin temporized.

Bucky laughed. “Yeah, and I'm _a little_ off in the head,” he replied. “I'm bugfuck crazy and everybody knows it, and that dame is creepy.” He shook his head.

“Oh, you don't seem that crazy to me,” Kevin said, and proceeded to wonder who had run away with his mouth.

Bucky raised an eyebrow at him, and a slow, sexy smirk made its way across the man's face. “That was a good effort, kid, I'll give you points for that. But trust me, you don't wanna get mixed up with somebody like me. I ain't nothin' but trouble.” He paused, tilting his head slightly. “Anybody tell you who I am?”

Kevin shook his head, feeling his ears turn bright red at the thought that he'd been so transparent. “Does it matter?” he asked.

“It matters,” Bucky replied. “Name's Barnes,” he continued. “James Buchanan. Look me up on that Google thing. I'm there.” Then he reached out with that metal hand and tapped the brim of Kevin's newsboy hat down about an inch on his forehead. “And stop wearin' your hat inside the building. Didn't your Pops ever tell you it's bad manners?”

“I didn't have a dad,” Kevin said automatically, reaching up to take the hat off and arrange his hair.

Bucky shook his head. “Well, that explains some of it.” He clicked his tongue at his dog. “Hey, if Darcy comes lookin' for me, tell her I took Max to training, would you?”

“Sure thing,” Kevin replied. He watched Bucky and his dog disappear into the elevator, and then he sat down at his desk, flipping open his laptop. He pulled up Google and typed in the name _James Buchanan Barnes_. The first result was a Wikipedia page. He clicked it, feeling utterly ridiculous, because of course Bucky couldn't... possibly... be... a World War II veteran and member of Captain America's Howling Commandos who was reported killed in action in 1945 but turned out actually to have been taken captive by HYDRA-affiliated Russians and held in cryostasis as a POW for sixty-nine years holy shit.

Kevin sat back, staring at the pictures of Bucky Barnes that lined the Wikipedia page. There was a black-and-white shot of him with a very short and skinny Captain America, circa 1935; there was a group shot of all the Howling Commandos, circa 1944; and there was a shot of Bucky in Army greens, accepting a very late Medal of Honor from President Obama in a private ceremony at the White House in July of 2014.

Kevin closed his eyes and rubbed gently at his temples. Of course he was crushing on an actual vintage World War II soldier. _Of course._ Because this was his life.

He sighed. He wasn't sure even getting a chance to be super-duper obstructionist was going to make the sting of this one go away any time soon.

***

When Coulson and his team arrived at the tower that afternoon, they were met in the lobby by a blank-faced Natasha Romanoff. She led them all into the elevator and escorted them to the sixty-fifth floor, past a young man with a faux-hawk and a faraway expression at the reception desk and into a conference room. In that room, Darcy, Steve, Tony, and Clint waited for them, along with a young dark-haired woman with a strip of cloth wound around her eyes, whom none of them had met before.

“Please have a seat,” Darcy said as Natasha closed the door and then leaned against it. “Before we begin, I'd like to introduce you to Ruth Aldine, also known as Blindfold. Ms. Aldine is a graduate of the Xavier School, and performs a very valuable and vital service to the Initiative.”

Coulson could guess what that service was, but the question was waiting to be asked, so he asked it. “And what service would that be?”

“She peeks inside your head, Agent, and tells us whether or not you're a lying sack of HYDRA.”

“Me first,” Trip volunteered.

“There is nothing to fear, thank you,” Blindfold said. “I don't peek, excuse me, except to look for the danger signs. This is something I think that you are very understanding of - that is to say, the need for finding these danger signs. You were taken in, I'm sorry, by someone you trusted. Two someones, I think, Agent Triplett. Yes, that is correct. But none of you are HYDRA, no. This is very good.” She turned her face toward Steve and Tony. “I am, excuse me, no longer needed here, so I will go. You will have JARVIS summon me if my presence is required. I will tour through the rest of the building, yes, over the next few days to determine who may stay and who must go. You believe that there is a leak in your Research and Development team, yes, this is likely correct, and I will determine who that leak is tomorrow.” She stood. “Thank you. Good night.”

With that, she swept from the room as easily as if she'd been sighted. There was a long silence after she left. Then Skye spoke. “Is it just me, or was that creepy and weird?”

“It wasn't just you,” May assured her.

“Okay, thanks.”

Darcy's lips twitched. “I like you,” she said. “I think I might just poach you.”

“You can't have her, Miss Lewis,” Coulson interjected mildly. “She's mine.”

“I owe you one for my iPod, Coulson,” Darcy replied easily and without heat. “She may not be as yours as you think she is.”

“Okay, let's call this meeting to order, shall we?” Steve interjected.

“Good plan,” Tony agreed.

“We're not going to work with you,” Clint said flatly, his eyes meeting Coulson's, his face expressionless. “But you can come work for us, if you want to actually do some good. Or you can keep boxing whatever shadows Nick Fury is projecting and hope you're not just dancing to his tune because of whatever he did to your head.”

Coulson's face flashed a myriad of expressions before settling into blandness again. “Is that an official offer from the Avengers Initiative?”

“It's the best offer you're going to get,” Tony said frankly, leaning back in his chair. “Clint told us what happened to you. Your choices aren't great. You can keep running like you're doing - and make no mistake: you _are_ running. And if they catch you - and they will - you'll be held as terrorists, tried, convicted, and dropped into a hole somewhere. Or you can come work for us, and _know_ that you're fighting for everything that's good and right in the world, and if anyone so much as looks at you funny, the entire weight of SI's legal department will crash down on their heads like an ACME anvil in a Looney Tunes short.”

“I'll admit that it's an attractive offer,” Coulson said. “But why can't we work together as separate teams?”

“Because we don't want to,” Steve said simply. When Coulson blinked at him, he gave the older man a smirk that never would have made it onto a trading card. “We're tired of being jerked around. We aren't taking orders any more; we're giving them. If you want to work with us, then your only option is to work _for_ us.” He leaned forward, folding his hands on the table. “You don't have to. This isn't some kind of ultimatum. If you choose to say no, you can say no, and you can go your own way. But you should know that this is a one-time offer. You don't get to change your mind and come running for help when things go sour on you out there.”

Coulson rubbed his chin for a moment, his eyes flicking across the faces of the Avengers. His eyes rested for a long time on Clint, who stared back at him impassively. Then he said, “Can we have some space to talk it over amongst ourselves?”

“Of course,” Darcy said. “Avengers, let's give them the room.” They stood and filed out, Darcy pulling the door shut behind them.

“I'm in favor,” Skye said immediately.

“I'm not,” May replied.

“I'm not in the least surprised that the two of you disagree on this,” Simmons mused, a slight smile on her face.

“I know you want to stay,” Skye commented, grinning. “Because I've seen you reading articles about Stark R&D when you think nobody's looking.”

Jemma shrugged, still smiling. “Of course I do,” she said. “And I can't speak for him with total certainty, but I think Fitz would, too. Really, you'd be hard pressed to find a scientist who _wouldn't_. But I won't break with the team; if the vote is to leave, I'll go with you. My loyalty is to the people in this room. And to Fitz.”

“So is everyone's,” Trip said, reaching over to pat her hand gently. “What we have to decide now is what's best for all of us as a group.”

“What do you think, Trip?” Coulson asked.

Trip took a deep breath, considering the question for a long moment before speaking. “I think we could use the backup,” he said finally. “What we've got is good, with the Playground and all that, but there's a logistical element that we're missing - supplies and weapons and medical and all that. And what Stark said about the legal part, that's not a little thing, either. And let's be honest - working for Captain America? At least we'd never have to worry about whether or not we were on the right side.”

“That's a strong point,” Coulson admitted.

Skye snickered. “Come on, Boss Man, you have to admit the idea of being able to say you work for Captain America makes you a little tingly in your fanboy place.”

Coulson gave her a _look_ , but her grin didn't subside - in fact, it got wider. He sighed. “All right, I admit it,” he said. “But I'll deny it ever after, so enjoy it now.”

“Well,” May said, “everyone makes good points. I would genuinely prefer that we remained independent of any other group and followed Fury's directives, but...”

And Coulson could understand that. There was a time when he would have felt the same way. But he didn't think he could trust Fury any more. He thought about what Barnes had said the other day, about how the reins had been dumped on him and he didn't know anything else to do but take them, and he realized that the man had been right. Phil took a deep breath. “Shall we put it to a vote?”

“All those in favor of tossing our chips in with Captain America,” Skye said, raising her hand. Trip and Simmons both raised theirs. After a moment of hesitation, so did Coulson.

“All those in favor of staying independent,” May said dryly, putting up her own hand. She was, of course, the only one. “And I'm like Simmons. My loyalty is to this team. So I'm overruled, but it's all right; I'm still here with you.”

Coulson nodded, giving her a slight smile. “We knew you would be.” He stood and went to the door, pulling it open. Natasha and Clint were sitting on a comfortable-looking couch nearby. They both looked up. “We're ready,” Coulson said.

A few minutes later, everyone was gathered back in the conference room again. “We've decided to accept your offer,” Coulson said.

“We figured you would,” Stark replied, smirking.

Darcy whacked him on the back of the head. “Don't gloat,” she said. Then she turned a smile on Coulson. “Welcome to the Avengers Initiative.”

***

They spent the rest of the afternoon doing really mundane things: filling out W-4 forms and direct deposit forms and signing contracts and otherwise dealing with the minutiae of getting hired by a multinational corporation. Skye got to spend an extra hour closeted with personnel from Legal, since her legal identity was questionable at best; Darcy assured her that she could be called by whatever name she wanted, since her legal name was so deeply awful, but she still had to put that legal name on the paperwork. However, she also assured Skye that as soon as she decided on a last name, Stark Legal would be more than happy to help her navigate the paperwork to have her name changed.

Then there were logistical issues like the fact that the team was living in a motel in Harlem; Darcy immediately arranged for a couple of the porters to head up there and pick up all of their things to bring back. She assigned each team member a small two-bedroom apartment in the second tower, a few floors up from Blindfold and with the same access, or lack thereof: the Avengers' residential floors were completely off-limits to them without an escort. Once that was done, Darcy released them to Security to have their employee badges made up, turned their paperwork over to Human Resources, and wished them all a good evening.

An hour or so later, May and Coulson were sitting in his blandly-furnished living room, staring at one another. “Well, that went... better than I expected,” Coulson said.

May gave him a flat, sarcastic look. “It would go even better if you'd get your head out of your ass and deal with Barton.”

Coulson sighed, tipping his head back against the back of the couch. “I'm trying,” he said. “I met him yesterday in the park where we always used to sit. I told him everything.”

“Everything?”

Phil nodded. “Absolutely everything,” he said. “Even about the GH-325. _Everything_.” He sighed. “When I finished telling him, he just... left.”

“Because it's Barton,” May replied. “And he's emotionally stunted.”

“Exactly,” Phil said. “So I'm waiting.” He sighed, closing his eyes. “He's like an alley cat, Melinda. If I try to chase him, he'll run so far and so fast that I'll never see him again. I have to sit and wait and hope he comes to me.”

Melinda reached out and patted his knee. “Good luck,” she said sincerely.


	10. Chapter 10

Despite Coulson's adamant insistence that his team remain his team, they did actually end up getting split up, to a certain degree. May, Coulson, and Trip spent most of their time on sixty-five, doing the work that they were trained to do. Skye spent most of her time with them, being trained to do what they did. Jemma, on the other hand, found herself very quickly moved upstairs to seventy-eight. Not that she was complaining loudly - or at all, really. Stark Industries' Research and Development laboratories were some of the most advanced research labs in the world, and the idea that she had been granted access to what Stark referred to as “Candyland” was a heady one for a young ex-SHIELD scientist. Darcy had assured them all that Jemma was still officially a member of Coulson's team, and that was all well and good, but really. _Candyland_.

Not to say that it hadn't been a bit of a surprise. On her first day at work, she reported to floor sixty-five with the rest of the team, only to find Darcy Lewis giving her a funny look over the rim of her coffee cup. “Why are you here?”

Jemma had stammered for a moment before managing to say, “I work here.”

Darcy waved a hand, her eyes squinting shut. “Early. Not enough caffeine. I _mean_ , why are you _here_ , on this floor? Science playground is upstairs.”

“Er...?” Jemma replied.

Darcy sighed. “This floor is for people who do superhero things against supervillains. Do you superhero?”

“No,” Jemma said. “Definitely not.”

“Exactly. You science. Science is upstairs. Seventy through seventy-nine. What kind of science do you science?”

“Biochemistry,” Jemma replied.

“Oh, excellent,” Darcy murmured, actually looking pleased. “We already have one of those you can report to. Seventy-eight. Lab four. You'll love it. Watch out for Stark, though. He's a fucking menace.”

Her teammates were being issued StarkPads and StarkPhones; she gave them a wave as she went past. Skye edged in her direction. “Where are you going?”

“Seventy-eight,” Jemma replied. “I'm to work in a lab.”

“Oh, boo!” Skye exclaimed. “I thought you'd be with us!”

“Well, I'm still on the team,” Jemma assured her. “But a lab is really where I belong. You'll have to come up and visit me!”

“I will!” Skye exclaimed, giving Jemma an impulsive hug.

“Jesus Christ,” Trip exclaimed. “You live _next door to each other_.”

Skye stuck her tongue out at him; Jemma merely blushed and waved again, scurrying into the elevator. She gave it her destination, and was swiftly carried up thirteen floors and let out in a pristine white hallway. She immediately felt more confident; she could tell by glancing through the huge windows into the labs on either side of the hall that this was exactly where she was supposed to be.

Science. Jemma took a deep breath, thinking of Fitz. He'd be there soon, hopefully; his therapy was going well, and there were many reasons to hope that he'd get himself back to himself again. For now, Jemma would go it alone - but that was all right. Working in a biochemistry laboratory was absolutely nothing new, and she was not in the least intimidated by all the fancy equipment and the looming threat of Tony Stark.

Until she stepped through the door of lab four and came face to face with Bruce Banner.

“Good morning,” he said.

She swallowed hard. “Good morning,” she squeaked. Then she cleared her throat and tried again. “Good morning, Dr. Banner. I'm Jemma Simmons.”

“The new SHIELD scientist; yes, Darcy told me you'd be coming.” Banner gave her a slight smile. “If it makes you uncomfortable to work with me, I'm sure we can have you reassigned.”

“What? No!” Jemma exclaimed, horrified. “I'm not uncomfortable at all, Dr. Banner. I was just surprised. She _didn't_ tell me who I'd be working for.”

“With,” he corrected her. “I might be technically in charge of the lab, Dr. Simmons, but we're all colleagues here.”

“In that case,” Jemma replied, offering a handshake, “I insist that you call me Jemma.”

Definitely smiling now, he shook her hand. “I'm Bruce,” he replied. “Welcome to Candyland.”

By the end of the day, Jemma had her own space carved out in the lab: an entire section in the back right-hand corner that was all hers, with her own lab tables and coolers and a computer with the kind of power she wouldn't have expected to find outside of NASA, attached to an entire bank of monitors on the wall. She had also been introduced to JARVIS and had a lively debate with him on the relative merits of having a physical form versus existing as an entirely digital entity.

On her second day, she started retrieving the data she'd been working on from before the fall of SHIELD, and her attempt to recreate or at least determine the nature of the formula called GH-325.

On her third day, she convinced Skye to stop in on her lunch break and donate a few vials of blood, then spent the entire afternoon attempting to isolate various proteins.

On her fourth day, while Bruce was taking what Jemma would later suspect was a well-timed run to the bakery, she was dragged out of the lab by Tony Stark and chivvied up to his workshop on seventy-nine, despite her repeated insistence that she was not in fact a medical doctor and was not qualified to examine anyone's prosthesis.

The first thing she heard when the doors slid open was “Goddammit, Stark, if you don't do somethin' about this robot, I swear to God I'm gonna turn it into scrap metal.”

“Hey!” Stark exclaimed. “Do not threaten Butterfingers. I'm the only one allowed to threaten the bots around here.”

“I ain't threatening,” came the reply. “I'm makin' a promise.”

Stark crossed the workshop to where a dark-haired man sat on a stool, his shirt off, with a robot hovering over him. The engineer chased the robot away, then turned back to the shirtless man. “All right,” he said, “I got help. Now let's see what we're dealing with here.”

The man turned, glancing over his shoulder at the door, and his eyebrows climbed up toward his hairline. “Thought you were gettin' Banner,” he said.

“Not there,” Stark replied, picking up a screwdriver. “Next best option.”

“Well she's a damn sight prettier than Banner,” the man replied. “Come on over, Doll, I don't bite.”

“It's Doctor Simmons, thank you,” Jemma replied automatically, taking a step forward.

“Sorry, Doc,” the man replied. “Didn't mean nothin' by it. Bucky Barnes.” He shoved Stark away and stood, offering his hand.

Jemma came and shook it. “I've heard of you,” she admitted.

“Nothin' good, I guess,” Barnes replied. “It's okay. I'm better now, though.”

“That's what I'd heard,” Jemma replied, keeping her voice dry.

Barnes chuckled, allowing Stark to yank him back onto his stool. Stark looked up. “Come here and have a look at this,” he said, prodding into Bucky's left armpit with the screwdriver.

Bucky jerked back. “Dammit, Stark, that hurt!”

“Well, I have to figure out how it comes off _somehow_!” Stark snapped back.

Jemma stepped forward, screwing up her courage and giving Stark a quick shove. He, not expecting it, staggered back a few paces and blinked at her in surprise, a slow grin forming on his face. She turned her back on him, not giving him time to start. She focused her eyes on Barnes's. “With the understanding that I am neither a medical doctor nor an expert in prosthetics,” she said, “why don't you tell me what seems to be the trouble, and we'll go from there.”

***

It turned out that Barnes's prosthetic arm was beginning to malfunction. He actually knew very little about it; though he'd been conscious for the initial installation, his memories of that event were muddled by the surrounding traumas and he was unable to recall anything of use. Subsequent to the installation, any time the arm had needed more than basic repair, he had been rendered unconscious.

Jemma studied it carefully, in as much detail as she could without being invasive. She asked JARVIS for all the available specifications and any scans that had been done, and examined the resultant holographic renderings with no small amount of horror. What had been done to Bucky Barnes was nothing short of barbaric. The arm itself was bionic, and years ahead of its time technologically. It was incredibly strong, with a potential force that far exceeded anything any human ought to be capable of. Capability came with a cost, though: the arm was incredibly heavy, and in order to ensure that its mere weight didn't cause it to rip itself free of Bucky's body, the housing had been grafted onto the front of his rib cage, his clavicle, and his scapula.

“I remember they took the arm off at the shoulder,” he told her when she inquired hesitantly about the amputation. “I lost it in the fall, you know. I thought I had some stump left, 'cause sometimes I'd get like a feeling in it, but I guess that's just what they call phantom limb.”

Jemma studied the whole works carefully, circling the exploded diagram that JARVIS projected several times, her eyes narrow as she examined it. Finally she turned to Stark. “Anything you do to it is going to cause pain,” she said. “No matter how delicate you are, no matter how careful. It's designed to hurt coming off, probably to deter him from removing it himself, if the programming broke down.”

“Yeah,” Bucky said softly, “that sounds like something those assholes would do.”

She turned to face him. “I know that this is the last thing you want to hear me say,” she said, “but I honestly think that the best way to manage this is going to be for you to allow us to anesthetize you while we do the repairs. The sheer amount of pain that's going to be involved...”

“I'm used to pain, sweetheart,” he replied, giving her a smile that showed too many teeth. “Pretty much eaten it for breakfast for years.”

“That may be so,” she replied, frost in her tone, “but I am not in the habit of causing pain, and I don't intend to start with you. If you choose to go forward without anesthesia, I will have no part in any procedure.”

There was a long silence while Bucky studied her face. At last, though, he nodded, just slightly. “Coulson said you were the dame for the job,” he said. “I think he was right.” He ran his right hand through his hair. “JARVIS, can you get Steve down here? He needs to be part of this.”

***

Twenty minutes later, Jemma found herself taking her stand once again, this time for Captain America himself. As much as she wanted to squeak and run away to her laboratory when faced with the daunting apparition that was Steve Rogers in full-on protective-of-Bucky mode, she forced herself to square her shoulders and stand her ground.

“Yes, Captain Rogers,” she said, clutching at the StarkPad in her hands, “I recognize that being anesthetized for a procedure on his arm is a very traumatic experience and a possible trigger for Sergeant Barnes's PTSD. Have you considered the fact that being operated on _without_ anesthetic might be even worse? We aren't talking about having a wound stitched up, Captain. We're talking about a level of pain that's comparable to the original loss of the limb, and I _will not_ be a part of that.”

Rogers stared at her for a long moment, considering. Then his eyes slid over to Barnes. “You were right,” he said. Then he turned back to Jemma. “All right,” he said. “Let's go over the procedure, starting from the top.”

Jemma opened her mouth, and Bucky interrupted. “And yes, we know, you're not an expert in biomechanical engineering. We get it. We don't _have_ an expert in biomechanical engineering. You _are_ an expert in biochemistry, and Stark knows how to work a wrench. So stop tellin' us what you think you _can't_ do and start showin' us what you _can_ do. Okay?”

She narrowed her eyes at him, and he grinned back at her, supremely self-satisfied. “ _Fine_ ,” she said. She stalked over to the worktable and asked JARVIS for the exploded diagram of Bucky's arm and shoulder. “This is what we're dealing with,” she explained. “Tony can actually explain a lot of this better than I can, because a lot of this is true engineering and not biological in the least. What I can tell you is that there are neural connections here, here, and here” - she pointed out the places as she spoke - “and I believe that at least two of them are malfunctioning. If I had to guess, I'd say they've probably _been_ malfunctioning for some time, and have gotten stopgap mending jobs. What I'm proposing is a proper repair, including an update to any components that need it. Unfortunately, we won't know what needs updating until we have eyes on.”

“So, not until you have me opened up,” Bucky clarified.

“That's correct.” Jemma nodded.

Rogers nodded, studying the diagram. Jemma saw his eyes narrow and his face get pinched when he made the same realization she had about the bone grafting, but he didn't mention it. Instead, he said, “And if you don't do this...?”

“Then that arm is going to stop working. Sooner, rather than later.” Jemma pressed her lips together tightly. “I don't like it either, Captain. But if we don't do something about it, then within the next year, Sergeant Barnes is going to have nothing more than a very shiny pendulum hanging off his shoulder.”

“We're doin' it,” Barnes said. There was a note of finality in his voice that got the Captain's attention; he turned and studied his friend carefully through narrowed eyes before nodding slowly.

“All right,” Rogers said. “It's your arm. If you want to do it, then we'll do it. But since Dr. Simmons is the one in charge, we're doing it her way.” Off Barnes's petulant expression, Rogers added, “I know you don't like it. But Darcy and I will be there, and you know Stark, and Bucky...” He reached out, clasping his friend's shoulder. “Nobody here is going to hurt you.”

There was a long pause as the two men studied each other, and then Barnes suddenly grinned. “Yeah. I know. You promised.”

***

They sat down, the four of them, and talked about the repair process. Stark went into technical detail about the engineering part of the repair, and reiterated the fact that he very much wanted to provide Bucky with a new, better arm. He could do it better, he insisted, than HYDRA had; he could incorporate new technology and safer power sources. “Look,” he explained, “it's currently running on a power source that leaks low levels of gamma radiation. Now, on the face of things, gamma radiation itself isn't technically harmful, but I'll remind everyone that sufficient amounts of it in combination with a bastardized version of the Erskine Serum are what made Bruce Banner the giant green rage monster that he is today.”

“And if I'm carryin' the serum and gettin' shot up with gamma radiation...” Bucky extrapolated.

“Precisely,” Jemma finished. “So it might actually be a good idea to let him do what he wants. This time.”

Tony grinned his manic grin.

Steve sat back, watching quietly, asking the occasional question. It was Bucky's arm, and Bucky's life, and Bucky had to make the ultimate decisions. Steve was mostly there for moral support. He found himself doing what he always did: analyzing the situation. He watched Tony bounce back and forth between holographic displays, designing on the fly, building a better arm even as they watched and incorporating the same technology into it that was in his arc reactor. “That thing'll power it for a hundred years without even blinking,” Tony assured them.

The engineer was in his element; he'd been wanting a crack at Bucky's cybernetics since Bucky arrived at the tower, and this was like Christmas and birthday all rolled into one for him. He was practically manic with glee. On the other hand, Jemma was quiet and serious, concerned about whether or not Bucky was totally understanding the procedure and what she was going to be doing. Despite the fact that bioengineering wasn't her specialty, she knew a lot about neurology and had extrapolated quite a lot about how the neural connections worked and where they were going wrong.

“I'm going to need to do some research before we begin,” she warned them. “I studied neurology at university, as part of my regular course, but it wasn't my focus, and I don't feel as confident as I should. The brain, as I'm sure you're both aware, is a very sensitive thing. A bit of tinkering and a monkey-finger in the wrong place, and I could reduce you to a drooling vegetable.”

“Yeah, that'd be a bad thing,” Bucky agreed. “You do what you gotta do, then, Doc. I can wait.”

“It won't take long,” Jemma said. “Perhaps a couple of weeks, just so that I can familiarize myself with the recent research. There are amazing strides being made in the field of bionic prosthetics, though of course nothing on this scale is available to the general public just yet.” She reached out and took Bucky's left hand, turning it over in her own and examining the way the plates fit together.

He looked down at her, his face taking on an odd expression that Steve hadn't seen since - well, since 1943. Steve felt his breath catch in his chest and forced himself to keep breathing calmly. He watched as Bucky flexed the arm for her, showing her how he used it, and then showing her where and how the panels opened for repair and modification.

Steve kept himself still and quiet, watching. He watched as Jemma asked questions about the arm and its functions, and the way that Bucky looked as he answered them. How he struggled to tell her everything that he could, dredging information out of the recesses of his brain like diamonds mined from deep within himself. And how he fairly glowed when she smiled at him, and how his eyes followed her all over the workshop when she got up and moved across the room to collaborate with Stark at the displays.

When they finally broke for the evening, Steve watched some more as Bucky retrieved his shirt from the worktable where he'd left it. He noticed how Jemma's eyes followed Bucky across the room, and how Bucky made it a point to flex his abdominal muscles hard as he pulled his shirt on. He noticed how, after whistling for Max, Bucky swaggered a little bit as he headed for the door, just like he always used to do, and he noticed how Jemma flushed just a little bit when he offered his goodbye.

In the hallway, he noticed how Bucky kept glancing back through the glass, trying to be unobtrusive about it, until they reached the elevator. Once they were inside, Steve gave Bucky a nudge. “She's cute,” he said simply.

“Yeah,” Bucky replied, grinning just a little bit. Then, quite suddenly, he sighed, his face falling and his shoulders slumping just a little bit. “Yeah, she is.”

“Hey,” Steve said, “what's that about?”

“Said it yourself,” Bucky said, looking away. “She's cute. And she's fuckin' brilliant. Girl like that's going places.”

“Yeah, so?” Steve asked.

Bucky shook his head as the elevator chimed and the doors slid open. He strode out, and his gait was smooth, lacking that confident swagger from before. “So what the hell's a girl like that want with me?”

“You've got plenty going for you, too, you know,” Steve replied, following him down the hall to their front door. “You've always been good-looking, and modern standards suit you right down to a T. You got plenty of money, so it's not like you couldn't take care of her. Hell, the kind of money you've got, you could give a girl just about anything she wanted.”

“Yeah, except a man that ain't broken,” Bucky replied. He drifted across the room to the window, Max following along, and he knelt down, rubbing at the dog's head. “A girl like that could have any guy she wants, Steve. She sure as hell don't want a half-crazy ex-assassin. You know it as well as I do.”

“And you know as well as I do that what you and I think a girl ought to want doesn't usually have a damn thing to do with what they actually do want,” Steve pointed out. “You think Darcy couldn't do a hundred times better than me? I'm just as broken as you are, pal, just in different ways. And yet not only does she stick around, she's wearin' my ring.” He shook his head. “Don't count yourself out before you know for sure, yeah?”

Bucky just snorted in reply.

***

The knock at Jemma's door that evening wasn't a huge surprise; Skye was always coming over for something, and sometimes Trip dropped by as well. The identity of her visitor that evening, though, had her flushing slightly at the state of her faded cupcake pajama pants and the oversized blue shirt that proudly proclaimed _Chemists do it periodically on the table._ Captain America took her in with one long glance and a tiny twitch of his lips before resolutely gluing his eyes to her face and kindly pretending that she was still in a skirt and a lab coat.

“Captain Rogers,” she managed. “I, er... wasn't expecting you.”

“Yes,” he said, “I know. May I come in?”

She stepped back from the door, closing it behind him and scurrying over to mute the television. “Is there something I can do for you?”

He rubbed at the back of his neck, looking distinctly uncomfortable. “It's about Bucky,” he said.

She tilted her head slightly. “If this is about Sergeant Barnes's surgery, I can assure you - ”

“No,” he interrupted her. “It's not about the surgery. It's about _Bucky._ ” He took a deep breath. “Look, I'm not good at this kind of thing. So please understand that I don't want to offend you or hurt your feelings or... or anything like that. But Bucky is my responsibility, and I have to look out for him.”

“Captain,” Jemma said, “I'm not sure what this is about, but Sergeant Barnes is a grown man, and - ”

“First of all, this is unofficial, so please call me Steve.” He interrupted her again. “And please just... hear me out, okay?” He waited for her to nod, and then he continued. “You weren't here when he first came in, so you don't know what it was like, those first few days, dealing with him and with what HYDRA did to him, before Professor Xavier was able to help him. But he's not just a soldier dealing with PTSD issues. He... they tortured him. They took him and they strapped him into a chair and they ran electricity through his head and they scooped him out and stuffed an assassin in where he used to be. And when he wasn't killing people for them, they stuck him in a freezer and left him there. For years or decades at a time. He's pinpointed the crimes they used him for, and we estimate that between 1945 and this spring, he was out of the freezer for less than a full year of time.”

“Christ,” Jemma whispered.

Steve nodded. “He's mostly stable now, but he still has... episodes. He still has nightmares and flashbacks, days where he can't speak, days where he's totally blank and he just sits and sort of stares. He won't talk about where he goes when that happens; I suspect he isn't even there any more. I _suspect_ that what we see when he has those days is what he was when they got done running lightning bolts through his brain.”

Jemma shivered hard at the thought. “That's horrific,” she said softly. “But I'm afraid I don't understand what it has to do with me.”

Steve's jaw firmed. “He likes you,” he said softly. “The Bucky I knew before the war, you and I would not be having this conversation right now. In all likelihood, because he'd already have you downtown at a dance hall or something. And before the war, Bucky was real good with women. He knew how to talk to women, knew how to woo them, and yeah, he knew how to get 'em in bed. But Bucky now, he's different, and I don't know how much of that he remembers. But I can see it on him when he looks at you. He likes you. And maybe it ain't any of my business, and maybe I'm overstepping, and if I am, then I'm sorry. But I wanted to make sure you know, because all those kinds of misunderstandings that are supposed to be all cute and funny in those romantic comedy movies? Those kinds of things could destroy him.”

Jemma swallowed hard, nodding. She could understand his concern. “So you wanted to make sure I was fully aware of the situation.”

“Exactly,” Steve replied. “I'm not going to ask you to date him or not date him or whatever - that's up to you and him and what you decided to do, and whether or not you even like him, and all of that. That's  _ definitely _ not my business. But I will ask you, whatever you do, to be  _ clear _ with him. Don't assume he understands signals and all of that stuff. Because maybe he will, but maybe he won't, either. Does that make sense?”

“It does,” Jemma said. “Thank you for coming by.” 

He nodded, taking that for the dismissal that it clearly was, and he left quietly.


	11. Chapter 11

For the first week after Coulson and his team moved into the tower complex, Clint stayed holed up in his apartment by himself. He wasn't antisocial - Bucky went over to watch football one day, and Natasha came by for dinner another night, and Thor stopped in one morning before lunch to check on him and ended up helping him rearrange the furniture - he just didn't come out.

When Steve came by on the sixth day to make sure Clint was still alive, he asked the archer about it. “So, are you ever coming out again, or are we going to have to start dragging the bad guys past your window?”

Clint laughed, opening the door to let Steve in. “Tempting,” he admitted. “Very tempting. But no. I'll be out eventually. I just...” He paused, running a hand across his head, and paced over toward the window. “I just had to think. You know? I had to think, and I had to... to try and get my head on straight.”

“About Coulson.”

“Yeah.” Clint dropped into the straight-backed chair at his new desk. He stared out the window for a long moment, then turned to face Steve, who was leaning against the back of the couch. “What would you do?” he asked.

“That's kind of a loaded question,” Steve replied. “I mean... there's Bucky.”

Clint grunted softly. “Good point.” he took a deep breath. “Does it... does it ever make you angry?”

“All the time,” Steve admitted.

“No, I mean... at _him_.”

Steve hooked an ottoman with his foot, bringing it closer to Clint, and plopped down on it, looking up at his teammate and friend. “All the time,” he repeated softly.

Clint looked surprised. “You do?”

“I do. I really do.” Steve kicked his shoes off and pulled one foot up onto the ottoman, wrapping his arms around his bent leg. “And not always for the same reasons. You have to remember that Bucky and Phil... the situation is going to be different. Phil isn't broken the way Bucky is, so it's easier to look at him and to forget what was done to him. It's easier to remember with Bucky, because... well, you saw him when he first came in.”

Clint nodded, remembering the shambling shell of a person Bucky had been when he'd first arrived, wracked alternately by flashbacks and triggers and a soul-deep terror of being recaptured and tortured and turned back into a mindless killer. “Hard to blame a guy when you've seen him stripped down to his component parts like that,” he said softly.

“Exactly. And even so... I'm only human, Clint. I'm not perfect, no matter how hard the propagandists tried to make me seem like I was. And we have good days and bad days, all of us. And sometimes when his bad days and my bad days coincide, I want to grab him by the shoulders and shake him and tell him to straighten up, to suck it up and get with the program. You know?” Steve sighed. “And it makes me feel like a horrible person afterward, and I probably overcompensate for it, but that's what gets _me_ through the night.”

Clint made a soft humming noise to indicate his understanding. His gaze went back to the window, but it was blank, and he was clearly seeing a different view. Steve waited for a moment before he said, very gently, “What do you _want_ , Clint? All other things being equal, and damn the consequences, what do you _want_?”

“I want Phil,” was the immediate reply. Clint's gaze focused again, coming to rest on Steve's face, and he repeated, “I want Phil.”

Steve's mouth quirked in a slight smile. “Okay. Then what's stopping you from having what you want?”

Clint opened his mouth to speak, paused, and studied Steve for a minute. He started again, then stopped. A third time, he repeated the action. Finally, he blew out a long, slow breath. “Not a fucking thing,” he admitted.

Steve stood up and pushed his feet back into his shoes. “Then what the fuck are you doing mooning around in here, you asshole?” he asked. With that, he turned and left Clint's apartment, pulling the door shut behind him.

Clint sat very still for a few minutes after Steve's departure, pondering the fact that Captain America had just called him an asshole. Then he got up and walked out the door.

***

When Phil Coulson's doorbell buzzed, he assumed it was a call from the lobby that his dinner had arrived. “Huh,” he muttered to himself. “That was quick.” He walked over to the intercom and pressed the button. “Yes?”

“Open the goddamn door,” Clint's voice demanded.

Phil snatched the door open and stood there in a tee shirt and jeans, his bare toes curling on the floor as he stared into Clint's eyes. “Hello,” he managed after a long, shocked moment.

Clint stepped forward, crowding up against Phil. Phil took a couple of quick steps back and Clint followed him, kicking the door shut behind him as he passed it. He backed Phil up against the wall of the entryway and leaned in, planting one hand on either side of Phil's face. “I need to know one thing,” he said softly, his breath brushing against Phil's chin. “If Fury hadn't fucked with your head, would you have come back to me?”

“I would have been here so fast that the wind of my passing would have torn shingles off roofs from here to Poughkeepsie,” Phil replied.

Clint nodded. “That's good enough for me,” he said, and he leaned in, pressing his lips to Phil's.

Phil's hands came up to cup Clint's cheeks, holding him close and kissing back desperately, making soft sounds of need and desire. Within just a minute, they were pressed tight against one another, Phil's back up against the wall and his fingers buried in Clint's hair. “Missed you,” Clint managed between hungry kisses, his voice nearly a whine. “Missed you so much.”

“God, I missed you, too,” Phil panted, his mouth finding Clint's pulse and nipping at it. His fingers slid down, reaching for the hem of Clint's t-shirt, but he froze when the door buzzer went. When it went again, he sighed, his shoulders slumping. “Shit,” he muttered. “That's my dinner.”

Clint released him, deliberately taking a few steps back and reaching up to straighten his hair. “You should... probably get that,” he said.

Phil reached out to touch his cheek. “Will you wait here until I come back?”

“Yeah,” Clint said. “We should... probably talk and stuff.”

Phil smiled. “I won't be long.”

Clint nodded. “I'll be here.”

***

In the lobby, as he collected his food from the delivery boy, Phil waved at Darcy and Skye, who were crossing the wider space together and heading for the front doors. They both waved back, deep in discussion about something on the StarkPad they were both looking at. Phil felt his lips quirk slightly as he watched them; knowing those two, it could be anything from work-related forms to a plot to infiltrate the global intelligence community to a particularly hilarious YouTube video of a penguin wearing a top hat and a monocle. He shook his head, gathering his bags and retreating into the Tower Two elevator. 

Clint was still there when he pushed his door open; he smiled at the archer, who smiled back. “Lucky I ordered enough to have leftovers,” Phil said, pushing the door shut behind himself. “You  _ do _ still like Ethiopian?”

“You know I do,” Clint replied. He grabbed two beers from Phil's refrigerator and two plates from the cupboard, and they met up at the table where Phil was setting out food. “What did you get?”

“Yesga sembousa, qey w'et, shiro w'et, and azifa,” Phil replied, pointing out each container in turn.

“Ooh, shiro w'et,” Clint exclaimed, reaching for the dish. “Come to papa.”

Phil snorted as he reached for the azifa. He pulled the lid off the container, intending to scoop some of the lentils out onto his plate, and very nearly ended up with a lap full of them when Clint's phone emitted an earsplitting siren. 

Clint came out of his chair so fast that it tumbled to the ground behind him, scrambling for the phone where he'd left it on the kitchen counter. He laid his hand on it just as JARVIS's voice came blaring out of the speakers. _ “AVENGERS ASSEMBLE. EMERGENCY BEACON ACTIVATED. SUBJECT: DARCY LEWIS. THIS IS NOT A DRILL. REPEAT: AVENGERS ASSEMBLE. EMERGENCY BEACON ACTIVATED. SUBJECT: DARCY LEWIS. THIS IS NOT A DRILL.” _

***

Getting kidnapped like this, Darcy decided as she was shoved into the back of a vehicle, was deeply and traumatizingly embarrassing.

Bad enough to actually  _ get _ kidnapped, because boy was Steve going to have a lot to say - probably at a high volume - once she got home. But to get kidnapped because she wasn't paying enough attention to her surroundings, because she was showing Skye a video of a headbanging parrot on her StarkPad? Oh, yeah. That was  _ humiliating. _

She and Skye had barely gotten half a block from the tower, on their way to the nearest coffee shop. There was a moving van parked on the fire lane. They'd stopped walking to let the movers pass with a coffee table, and just as they started forward again, they had been rushed from behind, grabbed and thrown into the back of the moving van. The door slammed shut, locking them in, and the van screeched forward, the sudden acceleration throwing both women against the back wall of the van. Horns sounded from all around; angry drivers shouted, but the van was pulling out and away.

Skye struggled to her feet and found the van's back door; she tried slamming against it, but there was no luck; it had been bolted from the outside. “Shit!” she exclaimed. “It's locked!”

“Hey, no stress,” Darcy replied. “We're trackable.”

“Sure, until we get someplace that's safe enough for them to stop,” Skye snapped. “That's when they come back here and take our phones and tie us up.”

“Well, yeah,” Darcy agreed. “That's why I've got a beacon.” She felt across the floor for the StarkPad, activating it with a press of her thumb once she found it. She breathed a sigh of relief. “It's not broken. Bless you, Stark, and your obsession with stress testing.” She flicked through the apps and pressed a button. “JARVIS?”

The AI's voice returned with comforting immediacy. “Yes, Miss Lewis?” 

“Could you please activate my emergency beacon? Skye and I have been kidnapped.”

“Beacon activated,” JARVIS stated. “Are you in immediate physical danger?”

“Not yet,” Darcy replied. “Just tell them we were walking up the sidewalk and got bumrushed from behind. No idea who or why yet. We're in a moving van; Skye, did you notice what color it was?”

“I think it was yellow,” Skye said after a moment's thought. 

“Are you armed?” JARVIS inquired.

“I'm not. Skye?”

“Only with my razor-sharp wit.”

“Well, that should serve us until they beat you senseless,” Darcy said cheerfully. 

Steve's voice cut into the feed. “Darcy?”

“Hey, babe,” Darcy replied. “I was just giving JARVIS the rundown. We're both unharmed so far; they just bumrushed us and shoved us into a moving van. Skye thinks it was yellow. I honestly wasn't paying attention.”

“We'll have to have a talk about that once you're home,” Steve said, his voice rough with worry. “Do you have your Taser?”

“Yeah, but I don't know how many of them there are, and it's only good for one shot at a time. It would probably only make things worse if I used it.”

“Yeah. Yeah, you're right.” He paused. “You know I'm coming for you.”

“I know, babe,” she said, trying to keep her voice even, staying calm to keep him calm. “Better hope you get there before I rescue myself.”

“Don't come too quickly, though,” Skye said.

“What?” Steve exclaimed. Darcy just blinked at her.

Skye dropped to her knees beside Darcy. “Think about it. If you get us on the way to wherever, then you have us back and that's great, I mean, I'm a hundred percent in favor of being rescued, believe me.  _ But _ if you wait until they get us to wherever we're going, then it's a possibility that we find their base - whoever this is. If it's HYDRA or whoever. And then we get a whole bunch of them all at once. See?”

“Yeah,” Darcy said slowly. “That's actually really good thinking.”

There was a very long silence from the other end of the line. And then Steve said, grudgingly, “It makes sense.”

“No worries, right?” Darcy said. “Stark can track me from his suit, so he can always just hover out of sight and trail us wherever we go.”

“Yeah,” Steve said, but he didn't sound like he liked it. “JARVIS, keep that line open and monitored as long as you can.”

“Of course, Captain,” JARVIS agreed.

“Okay,” Darcy said. “Suit up, Cap. You've gotta go mount a rescue.”

***

Within five minutes of the alert, the Avengers had assembled on the roof at the Quinjet landing pad. Tony got there first, and had the jet started already, coordinates locked into the guidance system. Thor came next, up the side of the building from the eighty-seventh floor terrace. Steve was right behind him, his shield on his back and murder in his eyes. Clint and Natasha arrived almost simultaneously, and Coulson stepped out of the elevator with them, already on the phone with his team, who were scrambling as backup. Last to arrive was Bucky, who came out of the elevator in full tactical gear, all the weapons he'd turned over to Steve in the spring now strapped to him in their proper places, and a Stark-made semi-automatic assault rifle strapped to his back.

“What's the situation?” Tony demanded.

“Darcy and Skye were snatched off the street on their way to the coffee shop,” Steve reported. “Because it was a quick snatch-and-grab, they didn't stop to tie them up or relieve them of their electronics.”

Natasha snorted.  “дебилы.”

“Мы будем учить их о своих ошибках,” Bucky agreed.

“Darcy has a tracker implanted in her arm,” Tony said. “I've got the jet already set to her coordinates, and JARVIS is tracking her on my heads-up also.”

“Okay,” Steve said. “Here's the plan.”

***

When the van finally stopped, Darcy sat up straight. “Here we go,” she said softly. She and Skye scrambled into the far corner, huddling together as though terrified, with their bags in their arms and the StarkPad hidden behind them. There was no sound from the other end, though the connection was still open; JARVIS had muted it to prevent their captors from suspecting anything.

The van door opened, and three muscular white guys in all-black mercenary-style outfits faced them. Two of them, both dark haired, were holding submachine guns. The third one, who was unarmed and blond, spoke. “Give me your bags,” he said.

“What do you want with us?” Darcy demanded.

“I want your fucking bags, bitch,” the man replied. “Toss them here now or I'll shoot your friend in the stomach and let her die slowly.”

Darcy and Skye both relinquished their bags immediately, tossing them toward the man. He didn't even bother digging through them; he simply took them and dropped them behind a bush. Then he turned back to them. “Here's how this is going to work,” he said. “Tying you up and putting bags over your heads is a fucking waste of my time and effort. You're going to do exactly what I tell you to do. You're not going to fight, you're not going to be clever and try to escape, or anything like that. Would you like to know why? I'll tell you why.” He pointed at Darcy. “You're wanted alive.” He pointed at Skye. “You're expendable. I don't give a fuck about you. I don't know who you are, where you came from, or why you're even fucking here except that you had the bad fucking luck to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. So we'll start with you. Either one of you steps out of line, even the tiniest little bit, and I'm gonna hurt you. Badly. In every possible way that I can think of to hurt you. Do you understand?”

Skye and Darcy both nodded.

“Good. I'm glad we're clear on that.” His finger went back to Darcy. “Notice how I said you're wanted _alive_. I didn't say _unharmed_. My boss won't like it much if I have to hurt you, but he'll understand as long as you're still breathing and capable of answering questions. Get me?”

Darcy nodded again.

“All right, then. Glad we had this little talk.” He slammed the van doors shut again. A moment later, the engine started back up and the van began to move again. 

The two women separated slightly, relaxing just a little bit now that the immediate danger was past, and Darcy picked up the pad, brushing her finger across the screen. “Catch all that?” she asked.

“We caught it,” Bucky's voice replied. “You keep your head down, Doll. I know sass is your first instinct but it won't go over real well with these guys.”

“Yeah, I got that message loud and clear,” Darcy assured him. “Where the hell are we?”

“Between Union City and Secaucus,” Tony replied. “I'm right behind you. Thor stopped and picked up your bags.”

“Aww, that was sweet of him,” Skye commented. “My Kindle's in that bag; I was _not_ gonna be happy about losing it.”

“You dames and your toys,” Bucky snarked. “If it ain't an iPod, it's a Kindle. What the fuck even is a Kindle?”

“It's for reading books on,” Darcy explained. “And they're expensive if you're not a recently defrosted super soldier who's rolling in back pay.”

“Yeah, I'll buy you three of the damn things,” Bucky snarled. “Just don't get fuckin' killed, okay?”

“Nobody needs three Kindles,” Darcy objected. “That's just ridiculous.”

***

The boredom of the trip led to both Darcy and Skye dozing off at alternate points during the drive; they didn't want to run the battery down on the StarkPad, so they left it alone, only communicating every once in awhile. Tony kept them updated on their location - Darcy suspected he was also keeping the rest of the Avengers updated as well - and finally, after nearly two hours of driving (that felt like forever), the van slowed, and Tony said, “This is it, people. They're entering a warehouse compound near the waterfront in Trenton. Clint, head for my coordinates.”

“On the way,” Clint replied. 

The van came to a stop and idled; from outside, Darcy and Skye could hear the voices of men and the clanking of chains. “Mute the feed,” Darcy whispered to JARVIS, and Tony's voice was cut off mid-word as he relayed information to his teammates. She tucked the pad behind her body again. She'd have tried to smuggle it under her shirt, but it was too big; its outlines would show immediately. “JARVIS,” she muttered, “keep this feed on as long as possible, but as soon as I'm separated from it, destroy this StarkPad. I don't want to risk any of these goons getting hold of it and getting away.”

The word  _ACKNOWLEDGED_ flashed on the pad's screen.

The van pulled forward, slowly, and gravel crunched under its tires. A moment later, it stopped again, and the engine cut off. “Here goes nothing,” Darcy said. She took a deep breath. “See you guys in a few minutes, yeah?”

She pushed the StarkPad into the back corner of the van and she and Skye huddled against one another again to hide it for as long as they could in hopes that their captors wouldn't notice it when they were removed from the van. And they were in luck. The same three men were standing there when the door was flung open again, and the unarmed one spoke again. “End of the line, girls,” he said. “Out.”

They stood and made their way to the door of the van; the men stepped back and let them get out on their own. Then the speaker pointed to a nearby door. “Walk. And remember what I said earlier about trying to escape.”

“Yeah,” Darcy said. “We remember.”

Skye scanned the whole area as discreetly as possible; her heart lifted a little bit when she noticed two men standing on the edge of a roof just up the street. One of them wore a cape, and there were thunderclouds rolling in from the west. She had, of course, known perfectly well that the Avengers were practically right on top of them, but it was entirely different to know it and to  _see_ it.

She swallowed hard and tried not to be scared as one of the men opened the rusty, green-painted door. Darcy squared her shoulders and went in first; Skye took a deep breath and followed her, her fists clenching nervously.

The men herded them down a long, tiled hallway that eventually opened up into a wide warehouse area. One side of the room was given over to some kind of fabrication equipment; the other side housed several banks of computers. There was a man standing in the middle of the room, dark-haired and chiseled and dressed all in black just like the ones guarding them. As Skye and Darcy got close, they realized that he was also covered in burn scars.

He finished giving orders to one of his lackeys, then turned and smirked at them. “So nice of you to join us,” he said. “Follow me.” He turned and crossed the warehouse, heading for a set of double doors.

The women exchanged glances, but followed. The scarred man led them down another hallway and then through a heavy steel door into another room that was full of computer equipment. This room, though, contained something even more terrifying: in the corner, huge and menacing, was a massive chair-like structure with clamps on the arms and some sort of armature that was clearly intended to wrap around someone's head.

Darcy's blood ran cold. In the back of her mind, she heard Bucky's voice very clearly.  _Sit down in the chair; we'll clean you up and put you away._ The chair - the machine they had used to wipe and reset the Winter Soldier - that must be it. She felt her breath come a little bit short.

“So, Miss Lewis. My name is Brock Rumlow.” The scarred man turned to face them, and he smiled broadly as he looked at Darcy. “I see you're already familiar with the chair,” he said. “That's good. You're going to get well acquainted with it today.”

“What do you want from me?” she demanded.

“I want the Winter Soldier,” the man replied. “And you're going to give him to me.”

Darcy lifted her chin. “Or what, you're going to put me in the chair?”

The man chuckled. “No. At least, not yet.” He gestured, and the blond man behind them grabbed Skye, shoving her forward.

“Hey!” Darcy shouted, moving automatically to stop them. She was halted by one of the men behind her, who simply wrapped a huge, meaty hand around her throat and snatched her backward.

The blond man shoved Skye into the chair, and Rumlow pushed a button on the attached control panel. The clamps closed on Skye's arms. She stared at Darcy, her eyes huge with panic. “What is this thing? What are you doing?”

The blond man picked something up. “Open your mouth,” he said. When Skye refused, clamping her lips shut, he reached over and pinched her nose closed. When she had to open her mouth to breathe, he shoved a rubber mouth-guard in between her teeth. 

“Now then,” Rumlow said. “Let's talk about the Winter Soldier.” He pressed another button. Electricity began to arc between the nodes on the inside of the headpiece as it slowly moved down toward Skye's face. 

Darcy struggled to get away from the man holding her. “Stop it! Let her go! Stop!”

Rumlow arched a brow, pausing the machine's movements. “Are you going to tell me what I want to know?”

But whatever answer Darcy might have given was interrupted by a terrific explosion from outside. Her eyes met Skye's, and they both shared a moment of terrified relief. The Avengers had arrived.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Russian translations accomplished using an online translator; if they're wrong, please let me know. :)
> 
> Natasha: "Morons."  
> Bucky: "We are going to teach them about their mistakes."


	12. Chapter 12

Rumlow and his blond henchman looked at each other. “The fuck was that?” Rumlow demanded.

“We don't have anything going on that should explode like that,” the blond guy replied.

“Go find out,” Rumlow said. The blond guy left, and Rumlow turned his gaze on Darcy. “Now, you were just about to answer my question,” he said. “Where is the Winter Soldier?”

Darcy smiled. “Right at this exact moment, I can't be totally sure, because there's always the possibility that little boom was a gas line exploding across town. But if I was a gambler, I'd be willing to bet that right at this very moment, the Winter Soldier is inside this building.”

Rumlow blinked at her. “What?”

Darcy smirked. “Want to see if I can call him?”

He blinked again. “What are you talking about?”

She rolled her eyes. “Jeez, you HYDRA guys aren't very smart, are you?” With that, she took a deep breath and began to scream at the top of her lungs.

***

Thor and Tony watched from a roof just up the street as Darcy and Skye were unloaded from the van and ushered inside the warehouse building. “Points in both their favor and ours,” Tony said. “They're not tied up or gagged, they're walking under their own power, and they don't seem to be hurt.”

“ETA three minutes,” Clint replied.

“Cut out the chatter on the comm,” Steve said. “Can we get a schematic of that building?”

“Accessing, Captain,” JARVIS replied. He sent the schematic to one of the displays inside the jet. “I have included a marker to show you Miss Lewis's location.”

The red light that was Darcy blinked its way down a corridor and into the large part of the warehouse. As Clint drew the jet into a hover over the gravel parking lot, it began to move again, down another corridor. Steve pointed at the building. “The girls are on the other side of the building,” he said. “Let's open up a door right there.”

“Sounds good to me, Cap,” Clint replied. He dropped the jet neatly into the parking lot. Natasha leaned out and tossed a grenade; the resultant explosion blew bricks and glass all over the place.

“Door's open!” Steve shouted. “You guys round 'em up. Don't kill unless you have to.” He leapt out of the side of the jet, leading the way, slinging his shield at the first round of defenders from inside the building. “Bucky, with me!”

“On your six,” Bucky replied, unholstering two very large handguns.

Tony and Thor joined them as they made their way into the building, and the groups split up. The larger force of Avengers spread out across the warehouse, disabling and capturing agents as they went; Steve followed JARVIS's voice in his earpiece as the AI directed him through the building.

And then, as they passed through a set of double doors, they heard the screams. “That's Darcy,” Steve said unnecessarily. 

They started to run.

***

The man behind her clubbed her hard on the side of the head, knocking her to her knees and sending her glasses flying across the room. “Shut your fucking mouth.”

Darcy grinned up at Rumlow, tasting blood in her mouth. “What's the matter?” she said. “I thought you wanted the Winter Soldier. I'm just trying to give you what you want.”

Rumlow pushed a button on the control panel and the clamps released Skye's arms; he grabbed her by the hair and snatched her out of the chair, ignoring her cries of pain and slinging her to the floor. The man who'd hit Darcy grabbed her and slammed her into the chair in Skye's place. The cuffs clamped down on her arms, and Rumlow grabbed the mouth guard that Skye was just spitting out. He crammed it into Darcy's mouth, narrowly avoiding her biting teeth, and he slammed his hand down on the control panel again. 

The armature swung, and the metal panels clamped down on Darcy's head. Fire shot through her brain, and she began to scream in pain as her body convulsed in the metal grip of the chair.

***

The door exploded inward.

At first, Skye wasn't sure whether to watch or duck or hide or curl up in a ball in the corner. Darcy was screaming, her body spasming in the chair, and Cap's shield flew through the air, taking Rumlow off his feet and slamming him into the wall as two gunshots in quick succession dropped the guards. 

Steve started across the room to the machine, but Bucky said, “Don't!”

“What do you mean, _don't_?!” Steve exclaimed. “Look at her!”

“ _I know!_ ” Bucky roared, shoving past Steve and going to the control panel. “It's the same thing they did to me! And if you do it wrong, she'll end up just like I was!” He studied the controls carefully as if Darcy wasn't a foot away from him, screaming in agony. He reached out and punched a button, then another and another, and suddenly the screaming stopped as the machine released.

Darcy slumped in the chair, sweat pouring down her face, and Steve was at her side immediately, gripping her hand. “Darcy?” he said. “Darce? Baby? Do you know me?”

She whimpered in pain, but she blinked up at him and managed to say, “Steve.”

Skye felt her own body droop in relief even as Steve bowed his head over Darcy's hand and muffled a sob against her skin. Bucky's human hand fell to Darcy's head, stroking her hair back. “You're gonna be okay, Doll,” he whispered to her. “I know it hurt; I know it was awful, but they didn't... they didn't take anything. You're gonna be okay.”

Her free hand rose to pat Bucky's cheek. “Had him... right where I wanted him,” she managed.

Bucky gave a watery chuckle. “Yeah, Darce,” he said. “You had him on the ropes.” He ran the backs of his fingers across her cheek, then released her to Steve's care, turning and coming back across the room to Skye. “Hey,” he said, crouching down beside her. “You okay?” His fingers caught her chin, turning her head this way and that to check for injuries.

Skye nodded. “Yeah, I'm good,” she said. “Just... you know. Might need clean pants.”

Bucky gave a rusty chuckle. “Yeah, this kinda thing can have that effect on you,” he said. “They didn't hurt you at all?”

She shook her head. “He put me in there first,” she admitted. “But then, when we heard the explosion and we knew you guys were here, Darcy...”

Bucky sighed. “She had to sass him,” he said.

Skye shrugged. “He  _was_ being exceptionally stupid.”

“What did he want?”

“You,” Skye admitted. She reached over and picked up Darcy's glasses where they'd fallen, then allowed Bucky to help her to her feet. “He wanted you, and he was going to torture me to make Darcy tell him where you were and how to get you. But then, like I said, explosion, and Darcy started sort of... taunting him that you were already here and coming for him.”

Bucky's mouth pressed itself down into a thin line. He glanced over and watched as Steve, his shield back on his shoulders, lifted Darcy carefully out of the chair. “Goddammit, Darce,” he muttered. He shook his head, then turned back to Skye. “Okay,” he said. “You go with Steve. I'm gonna deal with this business here.”

“Don't kill him,” Darcy muttered, reaching for Bucky's shoulder. “Information. We need...”

“Don't worry, Dollface,” Bucky said, not looking at her. “I ain't gonna kill him.” 

Skye looked at him nervously, glancing over at Steve. “Should I stay?” she asked him.

“No,” Bucky said firmly. “You go with the Captain.”

Steve studied Bucky for a long moment. Then he said, “I'll send Natasha.”

Bucky nodded. “That'll do just fine,” he said. “Get them out of here.”

Skye followed Steve and Darcy. She paused in the doorway just long enough to watch Bucky lift Rumlow's unconscious form with his metal arm and slam him down into the chair. And then she decided she didn't want to watch any more, and she hurried to catch up with Steve and Darcy.

***

When Natasha stepped into the room a few minutes later, Bucky was leaning casually against the wall, his arms folded across his chest. Rumlow, who was just returning to consciousness, was locked into the chair, the mouth guard between his teeth. Natasha looked from the man in the chair to Bucky and back again. “Oh,” she said simply.

“Mmm,” Bucky replied. “You know, it's a funny thing, memory is.”

“How so?” Natasha asked, leaning against the wall beside him.

“Well,” Bucky explained, “when you don't remember nothin', you don't think nothin' of nothin'. But then when you _do_ remember? When you get yourself back and you know who you are and you know what they did to you? Well, then.” He smiled slightly. “Then you remember who did what. And you think to yourself, in your mind, that there's people who maybe need to be reminded about how to treat other people. You know?”

Natasha turned and looked at him. “I have no idea what you just said.”

Bucky sighed. “This asshole was one of the ones standin' around watchin' like it was great fun while they fried my brains the last couple times.”

“Ah.”

“You know, I try to be all deep and philosophical and you just ruin it.”

“I'm terribly sorry,” Natasha replied in a tone that clearly indicated she was nothing of the sort. “So what are we going to do with him?”

“I was thinkin' we might explain to him just exactly what it means to be in that chair,” Bucky said. “And then once he's got a thorough understanding, I figure we can maybe ask him a couple of very friendly questions.”

“Hmm.” Natasha studied the man in the chair. “I'd rather just crush his testicles with my boot.”

“Yeah, I know,” Bucky replied. “I might let you, afterward.”

“You never want to let me have any fun,” she complained.

“Eh.” He shrugged. “You know how the Cap gets. Always gets huffy when we permanently damage the prisoners.”

“Oh, God, yes,” Natasha said, rolling her eyes. “The last time I put someone's eye out, I thought I'd never hear the end of it. He just went on and _on_ about the Geneva Conventions. Like I'm supposed to care about those!”

Bucky laughed. “Pretty sure I was on ice when they signed those things. They don't apply to me.” He straightened, pushing himself off the wall, and strolled over to the control panel. “Now, let's see what we have here. This looks like an amperage meter. And this looks like the programming selector - hey, Natasha, once we're done askin' questions, you wanna see what we can turn him into? I bet there's stuff on here that's a  _lot_ more fun than 'assassin with no personality,' don't you?”

“There might be a setting for 'eight-year-old girl'; you should check and see.”

“Oh, that would be fun.” Bucky tapped at his chin with his metal arm. “Oh, here we go. This is the one that just makes you scream.” He pushed a button. The armature swung, and the metal panels clamped down on Rumlow's head.

***

Skye flinched as the sound of screaming echoed down the hall from the room where they'd left Bucky with Rumlow. Captain America's face got very set and hard, his mouth settling into a grim line, but Thor reached out and placed a hand on the Captain's shoulder. “It is a messy business,” he said simply, “and not one for you.”

“What?” the Captain replied, looking up at the Asgardian. “Torture?”

But Thor shook his head and said simply, “Vengeance.”

Through the huge hole blown in the wall, Skye could see people moving around the jet in the parking lot. She did a double-take when she recognized Trip, and she slipped around Thor and the Captain, who was still carrying Darcy cradled against his chest, to run outside. 

“Hey, there you are!” Trip exclaimed, reaching for her. “I told A.C. you'd be fine.”

“I almost wasn't,” she admitted, accepting his hug. “The rescue squad got here just in time. They were going to torture me to make Darcy tell them where the Winter Soldier was.”

“So they were HYDRA?” Coulson asked, coming around the nose of the jet.

Skye gave him a quick hug as well, mindful of his dignity in front of the Avengers. “Yeah. The guy in charge called himself Rumlow.”

“Brock Rumlow?” Coulson asked. When Skye nodded, he shook his head. “He was the STRIKE team Alpha leader. I can't understand why he would go over to HYDRA. So many promising agents.”

“Freaking Nazis,” Skye muttered, shuddering.

Coulson shook his head. “What about Darcy?” he asked.

Skye turned and pointed to where the Captain was coming out of the building with Darcy still in his arms. Her eyes were closed and her head resting on his shoulder; Skye wondered if she'd passed out. “They have this chair in there,” Skye explained. “Bucky said it was the same one they used on him, I guess to brainwash him. They put me in it, but then when everything started happening, Rumlow pulled me out and put Darcy into it instead. It had a thing that went around her head, and I think it was some kind of electric shock.”

Coulson took several steps around the nose of the plane and waved in the direction of the van that the team had come in. Its side door slid open, and Jemma jumped out, bringing a large black case with her. “Who's hurt?” she asked as she came trotting over.

“Miss Lewis,” Coulson replied, gesturing to the Quinjet's door. “The Captain's taken her inside the jet.”

“Right, then,” Jemma said. She hefted the case - her version of a first aid kid - and carried it over to the side of the jet, leaning in to speak to the Captain.

Coulson turned to Skye. “All right,” he said. “Tell me everything that happened, starting from the moment you were grabbed.”

***

“You know, Rumlow, I never would have figured you for this much of a wimp,” Bucky said, crouching down in front of the chair where Rumlow sprawled, the cranial nodes turned off for the moment. Rumlow was whimpering, sweat mixing with tears of agony and running down his face and neck. “I mean, the way you stood there and watched while they strapped me in, kinda like you were enjoying it, I woulda sorta figured you'd like bein' on the receiving end. Or maybe I read you wrong,” he added, reaching out to stroke Rumlow's face with his metal hand. “Maybe you're the kinda guy that gets hard watchin' somebody _else_ scream. Is that what it is?”

“This is boring,” Natasha complained from her seat on the cabinet on the other side of the room. She was cleaning her nails with a Bowie knife. “Is it my turn to make him bleed yet?”

“In a minute,” Bucky said. “They gave me a nosebleed with this thing once, back in '76. I'm tryin' to see if I can find that setting.”

“That isn't a setting, it's a brain hemorrhage,” Natasha replied. “If you do that to him, you'll turn him into a vegetable. And you can't do that; the Captain won't like it.”

Bucky sighed theatrically. “I suppose you're right.”

He reached out and pulled the mouth guard out from between Rumlow's teeth. “Tell me about HYDRA,” he said. “Tell me who your boss is and where I can find him.”

“Fuck you,” Rumlow spat.

Bucky sighed again. He stuffed the guard back into Rumlow's mouth. “Nat,” he said. “Come here and have an accident.”

Natasha snorted. “You  _do_ know that's modern parlance for losing control of one's bladder.”

“No, I did not,” Bucky replied. “I'll file that one away, thanks.”

Natasha strolled over to the chair and studied the man trapped in it. “You know,” she said softly, “it was in the Red Room that they perfected the use of these chairs.”

“I know,” Bucky replied, his voice equally as soft.

She stared at Rumlow for another slow moment before saying, “I changed my mind. See if you can make his nose bleed.”

Bucky gave her a smile. “It's like you know me.”

***

Once she'd applied arnica gel to the nascent bruising on the side of Darcy's face and ascertained that there was no other physical damage, Jemma hopped back out of the jet and carried her case inside, where the Avengers were organizing their prisoners by category. The ones labeled “random hired thug” were being set aside for local law enforcement to deal with; anyone who ranked as “actual HYDRA goon,” on the other hand, quickly found themselves sitting against a wall with their wrists and ankles zip tied and a short-tempered Hawkeye and Thor standing in front of them, encouraging silence. 

Under the watchful eyes of those two Avengers, Jemma quickly performed basic first aid on those who needed it, applying numerous butterfly bandages and a couple of splints. As she reached the end of that task, though, she found herself looking around and worrying. She made her way over to the nearest Avenger, who turned out to be Hawkeye. “Pardon me, but, where's Sergeant Barnes?” she asked. “I don't see him anywhere.”

“He's... taking care of something,” Hawkeye replied, cagey. “He's fine, though. He'll be back in a few minutes.”

Jemma's eyes narrowed. “Taking care of what, exactly?” 

But Hawkeye shook his head. “You don't need to know, Simmons,” he assured her. “Let it rest.”

Jemma's jaw firmed up. “I will not. If he's hurt, he needs - ”

“I'm not hurt.”

Jemma jumped, spinning in place to find herself face-to face with the man in question. “Sergeant Barnes!” she exclaimed, laying a hand on her chest. “You startled me.”

Bucky smirked slightly. “Sorry 'bout that,” he said. “Anyway. Heard you askin' about me. I ain't hurt, so don't worry about me.”

Jemma sniffed. “I'll do so if I like.”

His smirk spread out into a full grin. “Feisty,” he said. He reached out to touch her, then paused, seemed to think better of it, and shoved his right hand into his pocket. “Anyway, I'm fine.”

But Jemma Simmons was no fool. She gripped his sleeve and dragged him over to the nearest table-like structure, flipping her case open. “Give me your hand.”

“It's fine, leave it.”

“I will do no such thing!” Jemma snapped, her voice edging toward shrill. She glared up at him, and he stared back at her in surprise. Then he pulled his hand out of his pocket and offered it to her. “Thank you,” she said firmly, taking his hand and examining it. “My god,” she said after a moment. “What did you _do_?”

“Was an accident,” he said.

“Well, I certainly didn't think you'd done it on purpose,” she replied, pulling antiseptic wipes out of her kit. “This is going to sting a bit.” She began cleaning the mostly-dried blood from around the gash on the back of his hand. “I'll ask again: what did you do?”

“I had to tear something up,” he answered. “Machinery. I usually use the other hand for that kinda thing but I got... carried away.” 

She gave him a narrow look. He tried a flirty smile. She pointed a finger at him. “You need to be more careful. Super-healing or not, you aren't indestructible, you know.”

“Yeah, Doll, I know.” He grinned even wider when she glared up at him again. “Sorry, Doll. _Doc_.”

She prodded him in the ribs with one finger before pulling out several butterfly bandages. “If this is you trying to flirt, I regret to inform you that your technique needs work.”

He waited for her to finish bandaging the wound on the back of his hand before turning it in her grip and raising it to touch a finger to the underside of her chin. “Okay,” he said. “So do I need to try harder or stop trying?”

She blinked at him, recalling Steve's words from his visit the previous night.  _He likes you... be clear with him._ She studied his eyes for a long moment. “I shouldn't do this,” she murmured, considering him. “Neither one of us is a very good risk right now. You've got trauma, I've got trauma, and technically you're meant to be my patient. If I'm at all sensible, I really, really shouldn't do this.”

He swallowed hard and visibly braced himself. “So...?”

“Well,” she said, as briskly as possible, “I work for SHIELD, even after HYDRA. No one's ever accused me of having an abundance of _sense_.” And then she smiled at him.

He grinned widely. “That's okay,” he said. “I don't go for girls with sense; they never seem to go for me.” She expected him to lean down and kiss her then, but he didn't. Instead, he crooked his finger and chucked her under the chin. “Dinner tonight?”

“All right,” Jemma replied before she could think better of it. “In or out?”

“Oh, definitely out,” he assured her, still grinning. “Nothing fancy, though. I ain't big on company manners, you know.”

“Of course not,” she said, a little acid. “What, hot dogs at Coney Island?”

“Well, anything sounds bad if you say it with _that_ attitude,” he responded. Then, infuriatingly, he tapped her on the nose. “Might wanna get your little box all packed up; looks like we're about ready to get out of here.” He turned his head, looking back toward the huge hole in the wall and the parking lot, and his face got very sad. “Steve needs to get Darcy back to the tower. She's gonna need to rest.”

Jemma reached out, impulsive, and laid a hand on his metal arm. “She's going to be fine,” she said softly. “I checked her over myself.”

“Yeah, I know,” Bucky replied, looking back at her. “Eventually.” He shook his head, pulling away from her. “Get your stuff together,” he said again. Then he gave her a wink and a slight curl of his lip. “Say seven? So you have time to get all dolled up before we go?”

She sniffed at him. “As though I'd need to.”

He laughed. “No, you don't,” he assured her, reaching out to tuck a stray lock of hair behind her ear. “Don't mean you ain't plannin' on it anyway.” His fingertips trailed across her cheek as he stepped away from her. “Wear jeans, though.” And before she could think of anything suitable to say in response to that, he was gone, halfway across the warehouse and helping Hawkeye to corral the prisoners.

Movement from her left caught her eye; from near the door, she saw Skye staring at her in amazement. And then both of Skye's hands rose, giving Jemma a double thumbs-up from across the room. Jemma rolled her eyes, sighed, and packed up her kit.


	13. Chapter 13

In the aftermath, everything was quiet.

Steve carried Darcy home, laid her on the bed, and curled up around her, holding her close while she slept off the aftereffects of the machine. He thought about telling her that she should go, that she should find someplace safe to live out her life, far away from him, where she couldn't be kidnapped and tortured simply because she knew him and his friends. But even as he had the thought, he knew two things. First, he knew that she would be enraged at the very idea; she'd been in danger before, because of her association with Jane, and had deliberately chosen the path her life was on; she would not thank him for trying to take that choice away from her. And second, he found that he was too damn selfish to let her go like that, even for her own good. He needed her.

Clint made his way back to Phil's apartment. They cleaned up the Ethiopian food - now gone cold - and ordered in Chinese. They ate it on the couch, cuddled up together the way they always used to do, sharing the little cardboard containers and teasing each other with their chopsticks. And when they were done eating, Clint laid his head on Phil's shoulder and said, very softly, that he was tired of being angry, and he just wanted his life back. Phil certainly couldn't argue with that. So they stayed cuddled up on the couch until they fell asleep together.

Trip, May, and Skye ordered in pizza and spent the evening watching  _Dog Cops._

Bucky borrowed Steve's bike and drove Jemma across the bridge into Brooklyn.

“It's the first time I've been over here since I've been back,” he warned her as they idled at a traffic light. “So, you know, don't make fun of me if I get lost.”

“Of course not,” Jemma assured him, patting his shoulder. 

He drove them easily through the quiet streets, finally pulling up to a stop at an intersection on the south end of DUMBO. “When I was a kid, they called this neighborhood Fulton's Landing, on account of the pier and the ferry and all,” he said. He pointed to a brownstone in the middle of the block. “That's the house I was born in.” 

“Really?” Jemma stared in awe. “That's... that's such an incredible piece of your history.”

“Yeah, I guess.” He shrugged, looking both pleased and uncomfortable. “We lived there until I was... I dunno, seven or eight, I guess. And then my folks died. Rebecca, my older sister, she got a scholarship to a boarding school, but I went to the orphanage. That's where I met Steve.”

“Was it awful?” Jemma asked. “One sees things on the television, you know, and reads about them in books, but I've always wondered if it was really as awful as they say.”

“It was, and it wasn't, at the same time,” Bucky replied. “I mean, it's awful, because your folks just died and you're going off to live with strangers and the nuns, well, let's just say most of 'em didn't have a whole lotta maternal instinct.” He shook his head. “But at the same time, it's not, because you're livin' in a place with a whole bunch of other kids who're all goin' through the same kinda thing. And so there's always somebody to talk to that understands, and you can maybe say to one of the older boys about how you miss your Ma, and they don't make fun of you, you know? They just say yeah, they miss their Ma, too.”

Jemma bit her lip. “It does sound... moderately awful,” she admitted.

Bucky laughed. “Come on,” he said, picking his feet up and rolling the bike forward. “Let's go see if it's still there.”

It was not still there; a plaque on the side of the new construction advertised that the location had formerly been the site of a boys' home run by the Sisters of Charity, but that the home had burned in the 1950s. Bucky stood there for a moment, running the fingers of his right hand over the plaque's raised lettering, and Jemma found herself wishing she knew him better so that she could offer him the kind of comfort that would help and that he would be willing to accept.

As it was, she simply stood beside him, her hands wrapped around his metal arm, and tried to project comfort through the warmth of her presence at his side. After a long, quiet moment, Bucky stepped back and gave her a sideways grin. “The nuns always said I'd never amount to much,” he confessed. “On account of all the fighting. They thought I was a troublemaker.”

She raised an eyebrow. “Weren't you?”

He laughed. “Let me tell you a story about how little Bucky Barnes met little Stevie Rogers.”

***

“So, the thing about it is, I'm a year older than Stevie,” Bucky explained once they were seated on a bench in Prospect Park with a couple of hot dogs and cans of soda. “And when you're in a place like that, like the boys' home, the older boys have to be responsible for the younger ones, and watch out for trouble and stuff, because with a hundred or more boys crammed into one building with only ten or so nuns and a couple of older priests to watch out for 'em, there's a _lot_ of trouble just waitin' around to happen.”

“I can imagine so,” Jemma said dryly.

Bucky grinned. “Yeah. And you know, it wasn't always... See, it was different, back then. People didn't...” He paused, working out what he wanted to say. “If it was bad, where you lived, and you couldn't take it any more, you left, see? And there'd be places you could go to work - Steve sold papers for awhile, and sometimes I worked as a shoeshine boy - and if you had a couple nickels to rub together, you could stay in the hostels or the boardin' houses. Just because they sent you to the orphanage, it didn't mean you had to stay there, see?”

Jemma nodded. “I do see.”

Bucky nodded. “So the boys that was real trouble, most of the time, they didn't stay around. The ones who stayed were the boys who... who needed a family. Not everybody's cut out to be on their own, you know?” He sighed. “Sometimes I think maybe it'd be better if I was - all around. But I ain't, and that's just it.”

“There's no shame in needing people,” Jemma said softly.

He smiled at her. “No, I guess not.” He took a sip of his soda. “So anyway, like I say, the older boys had a responsibility to make sure the younger ones didn't make trouble. So there I was, nine going on ten or so, and I came out onto the street one afternoon and there's this kid, right, skinny and tiny, looks like he's about five or six years old, just getting his weedy little ass beat by a kid about my age and a couple of his pals. I go flying in there to break things up, and I clear them out, and I turn around, and there sits this kid, I swear to God, Jemma, his eyes looked like they took up his whole damn head, and from the ground he says to me, 'I had 'em on the ropes.'”

Jemma clapped her hands over her mouth to muffle her hysterical laughter. “And that was Captain Rogers?”

“That was Stevie,” Bucky said. “He damn sure wasn't Captain Rogers back then. He was maybe three feet tall, if he was lucky.” He shook his head. “Course, you gotta remember, the day I shipped out, he mighta weighed a hundred pounds with his pockets fulla rocks and he came up to about here on me.” Bucky held his hand up, flat, near his chin.

“No!” Jemma shook her head. “I mean, I've seen photographs, but I have trouble believing he was _that small_.”

“Well, believe it, sweetheart,” Bucky replied, carrying their trash into a nearby garbage can and then returning. “It's the gospel truth.”

Jemma sighed. “I just can't see it. Such a change should be... impossible.”

“Yeah, well, with what those two whack jobs did to him, I'm surprised he didn't die in their fuckin' science lab,” Bucky said, his expression turning slightly dark. Then he shook his head, banishing the negative feelings. “So anyway, that's how I met Steve. And I spent the next fifteen years gettin' in between him and whatever asshole he'd decided to pick a fight with. I swear to God, sometimes I just wanted to lock his dumb ass in a cage.”

Jemma couldn't help it; she laughed. Bucky grinned at the sound, obviously pleased with himself for having drawn it out of her. She shook her head, taking his hand. “So what you're telling me is that it wasn't you who was the troublemaker; it was him.”

“It _was_ him!” Bucky insisted. “But he looks so damn sweet and innocent, nobody ever believes it! I'm tellin' you, Jemma, we got caught up in a block fight one time, Germans and Irish, and it was all I could do to get him outta there with his head still attached. He started out throwin' rocks, and I looked around at one point and the little bastard had a half a fence post in his hand, whalin' on one of the Mueller boys.”

Jemma's eyes had gone huge. “They certainly don't put  _that_ in the histories!”

“Hell no, they don't.” Bucky shook his head. “Might tarnish the image.”

“Have you looked at the books?” she asked, curious. “To see what they say about you, I mean.”

He shook his head. “Darcy tried to get me to read 'em but...” He shrugged. “I saw the exhibit at the Smithsonian. When everything was still all messed up and I was tryin' to figure out who I was and what was goin' on. So I know what they say. They call me a hero and all that.” He shook his head. “I wasn't then and I ain't now. The only reason I was out there was because I had to watch Steve's back. He's the hero, not me.”

“Mmm,” Jemma said softly. “We'll agree to disagree on that matter.” When he gave her a slightly cross look, she just smiled at him.

He shook his head. Then, quite suddenly, he reached out and took her left hand in his right. “So,” he said, turning her hand over and examining it like it was the most fascinating thing he'd ever seen. “You've spent all this time listenin' to me ramble on, and I ain't hardly let you get a word in edgewise. Now it's your turn. Tell me all about you.”

“Oh, well.” She flushed, looking down at their joined hands. “It's not nearly as interesting as your story.”

“Bet it is to me,” he replied, glancing up at her and smiling.

“Oh, all right, then,” she replied, smiling back. “Well. I was born in Stocksbridge, which is in Yorkshire, in the north of England, but when I was eleven I went to boarding school. I graduated very early and went to Cambridge for biochemistry. SHIELD recruited me just after I finished my Ph.D., and so I went from Cambridge to SciTech. I met Fitz there - he and I bonded over being the youngest freshmen - we were both just eighteen.”

Bucky blinked. “You had a Ph.D. at eighteen?”

Jemma blushed. “Well, yes. My first one.”

He blinked again. “How many do you have?”

“Er.” She rubbed at her nose. “Three.”

“All of 'em in science?”

She nodded, wondering what was going through his head.

He stared at her for a moment in abject shock, and then suddenly he grinned widely. “Well, damn,” he said. “I never had a second look from a girl as smart as you before. How'd I get so lucky?”

She grinned back. Dropping her voice to a low, bedroom tone, she said, “I find myself extremely fascinated by certain parts of your anatomy.” She shifted closer to him, and her hands darted out, grabbing his left hand and pulling it closer. “And I  _really_ want to get inside of it.”

His jaw dropped. There was silence between them for a long moment, as his dumbfounded eyes met hers, which twinkled with mischief. Then he roared with laughter, and when he was calm, he leaned forward and he kissed her.

***

When he heard the sound of the front door closing, Steve slipped out of Darcy's arms and padded out into the living room. He grinned at Bucky, who had stopped to pet Max on his way through the living room. “How'd it go?”

Bucky looked up and grinned. “Good,” he said. “Real good. I think she likes me.”

Steve smiled. “I'm glad,” he said. “Really.”

“Yeah, who'd 'a thought, back in the day, I'd be makin' time with a girl like that?” Bucky shook his head, feeding Max a treat and rubbing his head.

“Yeah, well,” Steve replied, leaning against the arm of the couch, “who'd have thought back in the day I'd be makin' time with a girl like Darcy? I'm telling you, pal, we're _both_ swingin' above our weight classes these days.”

Bucky shook his head. “It's a different world, man. Back then, there ain't no  _way_ them two dames woulda given us the time of day.” Max rolled over, and Bucky rubbed his belly. Then he looked up at Steve again. “How's Darcy?”

“Okay,” Steve said, slumping a little bit. He reached up and rubbed at his face. “Banner convinced her to take something for the... headache.”

Bucky grimaced. “Yeah, she's gonna have a bitch of a headache for awhile,” he said. He looked down at Max again. “I'm sorry,” he said softly.

“For what?” Steve asked, confused.

“That she got hurt because of me.”

“Bucky, this wasn't your fault.”

“I know that,” Bucky replied, looking up. “I'm not blamin' myself. The only person to blame here is that asshole Rumlow and whoever he's workin' for. But it still happened _because_ of me, because she knew I was here, and she's a soft target. So I'm sorry about that. I...” He paused, swallowing hard. “I wouldn't ever want her to get hurt on my account.”

Steve dropped to one knee, reaching out to grip Bucky's shoulder. “This happened because some asshole thought you might still be a viable weapon for HYDRA to use. And you're not. And now they  _know_ you're not.”

“Yeah,” Bucky said. “Still.”

“I know,” Steve said. “I don't want her hurt either. But I was layin' in there earlier, thinkin' it might be smarter for me and her to part ways, you know?” When Bucky's head jerked up in shock, Steve grinned slightly. “I know, right? I'm an idiot. What can I say? But like I say, I was layin' there thinkin' this, and thinkin' how much it would fuckin' kill me to let her go, but I'd do it to keep her safe. And then it occurred to me that she wouldn't be safe, even if she went. She was involved in this crazy life long before I met her; in fact, if she hadn't been, I never would have met her. She had an opportunity to leave, to go off and be safe and unknown somewhere, and she _chose_ this life. She _chose_ Jane and Thor and the rest of us, and she _chose_ to take on the new org down on sixty-five, and she _chose_ me, and hell, Bucky, she even chose _you_. So who am I to take her choice away from her?”

Bucky nodded. “Yeah,” he said softly. “That makes sense.”

Steve squeezed Bucky's shoulder. “Sure it does,” he said. “And look. That goes for Jemma, too. She  _chose_ SHIELD, and she chose to stay with Coulson and his team even after SHIELD went all to hell. She chose this life just like Darcy did. Just like I did. And I know you didn't, but - ”

“Well, but I kinda did, though,” Bucky interrupted.

Steve raised an eyebrow. “Did you? When's that?”

Bucky grinned. “That night in London, back in '43. You asked me if I was ready to follow Captain America into the jaws of death, and I said no - that little guy from Brooklyn who - ”

“ \- who was too dumb not to run away from a fight,” Steve finished along with him. They grinned at each other. Steve said, “Yeah, I guess you did.”

Bucky nodded. “Maybe I didn't know what the hell I was gettin' myself into, but I chose it anyway.” He reached up with his left hand, placing it on top of Steve's where it still rested on his shoulder. “And if I had it to do over again, I'd do it all again as long as it meant I'd end up right here.”

Wordless, Steve pulled Bucky into his arms and squeezed him tight. Bucky hugged him back, and if they were both wiping their faces when they finally drew apart, there was nobody there to tell.

***

When he slid back into bed, Darcy rolled over and opened her eyes. She blinked at him for a long moment before reaching up with one clumsy hand to touch his face. “Steve,” she murmured.

“Yeah, Darce,” he replied, his voice low. “It's me.”

“Okay?”

He leaned in and pressed a gentle kiss to her forehead. “Everything's fine. Bucky just got home from his date.”

Her lips curled up into a soft smile. “Fun?”

“Yeah, I think so. We'll get him to tell us all about it in the morning.”

“Good.” She closed her eyes for a long moment, and he thought she'd gone back to sleep, but then her hand came to her own face, rubbing at her eyes. “Ugh,” she muttered. “Brain's fuzzy.”

“It's the pain pill,” he assured her. “Remember, Bruce came and gave it to you?”

“I 'member,” she replied, her eyes slitting open to glare at him. “Not deficient, just drugged,” she said crossly.

He chuckled, reaching up with his thumb to rub at the divot between her eyebrows. “I know, Doll,” he whispered. 

“Ugh,” she said again, flopping over onto her back. “Hate this feeling. Like I'm trying to think through jello.”

“Well, let it go for now,” he said. “Just go back to sleep.”

“Noooo,” she drawled. “Have to pee.”

He laughed, rolling out of bed and coming around to her side. He tossed the covers back and helped her to her feet. Then, when she proved unsteady, he helped her into the bathroom as well. He stepped out to give her privacy, and she emerged a few minutes later on her own, still staggering a bit but not as bad as she had been. “You want a drink of water or anything?” he asked.

“Yeah,” she said, rubbing at her face again. “Please. I can get to the bed on my own. I think.”

He watched her stagger across the room and fall onto the bed and just shook his head, going out to the kitchen to fetch a glass of water. By the time he got back, she'd managed to wriggle into her proper place, and was sitting up with her back braced against the headboard. He brought her the water and helped her hold it when her hands were too shaky. “Better?” he asked when she'd done.

“Yeah. Thanks.” She gave him another blurry smile as he set the glass aside on the bedside table, her pupils blown wide from the medication. “I'm glad he had a good time,” she said. “He should get to be happy too.”

“Yeah,” Steve agreed, moving back around the bed and climbing in beside her. He took a deep breath as she cuddled against his chest. “I've... I've been afraid that...”

“That he wouldn't ever find anyone?” she asked, looking up at him. “That nobody would take him like he is?”

He shrugged, wrapping his arm around her. “it's not outside the realm of possibility,” he admitted. “He's... he's still not a hundred percent.”

“No, and he probably won't ever be, not like you remember,” Darcy said. “But keep in mind that for girls like me and Jemma, we've been at war for our whole adult lives. I was fifteen when the Twin Towers fell, and we invaded Afghanistan just a month after that happened. And Jemma's about the same age as I am. So... I mean... it's been a fact of life for both of us, and for a lot of girls our age, that the pool of available guys was going to have soldiers and former soldiers in it. And where soldiers are, there's also PTSD and all the problems that come along with that. So it's like... you sort of know what you're getting into, if you're willing to date a soldier.”

“You have to admit, though, that dating Bucky - or dating me, for that matter - isn't the same as dating a soldier that was born in the 1980s like you were.”

“Of course it's not,” Darcy agreed. “But dating you wouldn't be the same as dating a guy born in the eighties even if you _didn't_ have PTSD. So...” She shrugged. 

“No, I guess you have a point,” he acknowledged. 

She patted his chest. “So don't worry about it,” she said softly. “Jemma's good people. She's smart. She knows the score about PTSD, and she knows the score about frozen vintage super-soldier. And she's, you know, SHIELD or whatever, so she knows the score about weird, too.”

Steve laughed. “I guess that's true.”

“It is true. So try not to worry about this. I mean, I know you're going to worry anyway, because you are the worryingest worrywart I ever saw in my life, but _try_ to think positive.”

“I'm not sure worryingest is a word.”

“It's totally a word.”

“I'm pretty sure it's not.”

She raised herself up and turned, straddling his lap and sitting on his thighs. “It totally is, and the next time we play Scrabble, I'm putting it on a triple word score and kicking your  _butt_ with it.”

“You can try,” he assured her, his fingers finding the hem of her sleep shirt and slowly pulling it up over her head before tossing the garment into the floor. “But I'm pretty sure when you do, I'm going to challenge that word, and it's not going to be in the dictionary.”

Her own fingers slipped under the hem of his t-shirt, her nails scratching up his abdomen, making his muscles twitch. “Hmm,” she said. “I guess we'll just have to see about that.” His shirt landed on top of hers, and she leaned into him for a long, slow kiss. “Now, would you rather fight, or would you rather take advantage of the fact that I'm high as a kite and  _super_ hot for you?”

He chuckled against her throat. “I think I'd much rather take advantage,” he assured her, nipping at her skin. “Now, hush and let me ravish you.”

“Oh, is that what you were doing?” she asked, leaning back just a little bit and grinning. “I was having a hard time telling.”

“Well, clearly I need to try harder,” he said, and he proceeded to do just that.

***

As the sun rose over Manhattan, Steve stood in front of the windows and watched the golden light slowly flood over the city. He considered it.

A year ago, he'd been in much the same place - watching sunrises because of sleeplessness - but then, the cause of his restless nights had been his guilt and his nightmares and his pain, not this effervescent, bone-deep joy that he felt inside himself today. A year ago, he'd been cripplingly lonely and full of rage and despair; today, he found his life so full that he could barely comprehend it. With Bucky upstairs and Darcy in his bed, he felt as though there was absolutely nothing else that he could ask of the universe. Anything he could have possibly ever wanted had been given to him, and the road lay open for even more besides.

A year ago, his life had been bleak and desolate. Today, he had a woman in his arms and his brother by his side.

A year ago, his future had been filled with nothing but more desolation: nothing to live for but the fight, and nothing to fight for that he really cared about. Today, he saw not only his own future, but Bucky's as well. They had suffered, both of them, but now they could rejoice.

He closed his eyes for a long moment, feeling the sun's rays warm him through the glass, and for just a moment, he thought he felt a gentle hand touch his face and smelled the faintest trace of his mother's rose perfume. When he opened his eyes, it was gone, but the fullness in his heart was stronger than ever.

And as the sun rose over Manhattan, Steve Rogers smiled.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, um... this is it, guys. This is the end. 
> 
> I'd like to take a moment to thank you - all of you. Whether you've left comments or kudos or whether you haven't. If you're reading this, and you've read everything that came before it, _thank you_. The response to this series has been beyond amazing to me, and this fandom has welcomed me with such open arms. I am really, _really_ glad I finally got off my duff and came to write for you guys.
> 
> Would you all believe _A Death in the Family_ was supposed to have been a one-shot? LOL!
> 
> I am officially marking this series as closed; however, it's _always possible_ that I may come back and revisit it in some one-shots, especially for the background relationships and other stories. So, please, if you want to make sure not to miss anything, grab an author subscription while you're here. 
> 
> Extra and special thanks go, as always, to Secondalto and Citymusings, my intrepid beta readers, without whom my work would not be nearly as entertaining as it is.
> 
> And again, thank you all so much for making this series such a great experience for me. <3

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [(podfic) SWORD and SHIELD](https://archiveofourown.org/works/3830386) by [secondalto](https://archiveofourown.org/users/secondalto/pseuds/secondalto)




End file.
